Senior Engineering Manager, Test Function

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Lead, mentor and grow a geographically distributed team of SDETs across North America, Europe and Asia
• ▹Define and execute the AI testing strategy: integrate AI, LLMs and autonomous test agents into the testing lifecycle (automated test case generation, smart failure triage, self-healing test scripts, dynamic edge-case synthesis)
• ▹Establish testing strategies for low-latency, high-throughput C/Lua/Rust data planes
• ▹Oversee the architectural evolution of end-to-end, performance, regression and chaos-testing automation harnesses embedded in modern CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Docker, K8s)
• ▹Drive quality ownership upstream: partner with Software Engineering and Product Management to embed testability standards into initial architectural designs
• ▹Define and monitor enterprise-grade QE health metrics (CI signal reliability, automation coverage, defect density, time-to-triage, release stability)

Requirements

• ▹10+ years in software engineering or SDET, building and scaling enterprise software test automation systems
• ▹4+ years in engineering management leading distributed or global software engineering/SDET teams
• ▹Hands-on experience applying LLMs, generative AI or autonomous agent frameworks (e.g. Model Context Protocol, agentic tool-calling, synthetic data generation) to software quality or developer workflows
• ▹Ability to manage a follow-the-sun operational cadence, vendor partnerships and cross-timezone execution

Nice to have

• ▹Direct experience testing high-performance networking data planes, proxies or API gateways (e.g. Kong, NGINX, Envoy)
• ▹Background in performance testing, chaos engineering (e.g. Gremlin, Litmus) and load testing of high-availability SaaS platforms
• ▹Active involvement or contributions to open-source quality frameworks or AI development tooling

Soft skills

About the company

Kong Inc. is a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Kong Konnect, its unified API and AI platform, helps organizations secure, manage, accelerate and govern the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models.