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Kong is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own the Cloud Gateways platform, Kong's foundational cloud-native SaaS infrastructure powering managed API and AI Gateway offerings. This is a hands-on technical leadership role with end-to-end ownership of core platform capabilities spanning software engineering, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure and site reliability engineering.
You will shape technical strategy, influence platform architecture and solve complex engineering challenges while working across engineering organizations globally. The role requires a systems mindset and passion for building platforms that are reliable, scalable and simple to operate.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning the technical direction, architecture and evolution of Cloud Gateways, designing highly available cloud-native infrastructure across Kubernetes and public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Driving reliability and operational excellence by defining SLIs, SLOs and error budgets while ensuring the platform consistently meets 99.99% availability objectives
- Building platform capabilities that automate provisioning, lifecycle management, fleet-wide upgrades, configuration management and infrastructure orchestration
- Leading through technical influence by shaping strategy across engineering organizations, building alignment with leadership and mentoring engineers
- Operating globally distributed control plane services at enterprise scale, managing the lifecycle of thousands of dedicated gateway deployments across multiple cloud regions
- Designing zero-downtime provisioning, upgrades and fleet-wide orchestration
- Improving observability, scalability, capacity, infrastructure efficiency and platform resilience
You'll work on problems spanning distributed systems, cloud infrastructure automation, fleet management, software lifecycle management, zero-downtime upgrades, observability and multi-region operations. Success requires balancing software engineering, cloud infrastructure and operational excellence while optimizing for the platform as a whole rather than individual services. You should be equally comfortable diving deep into production issues, designing resilient distributed systems and influencing long-term platform architecture.
