Senior Engineering Manager - Test Function

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Serve as global leader for Quality Engineering across Kong's flagship runtime platforms (AI Gateway, API Gateway, Event Gateway, Mesh)
• ▹Lead, mentor and grow a distributed global SDET organization across North America, Europe and Asia
• ▹Define and execute the roadmap for integrating AI, LLMs and autonomous test agents into the testing lifecycle
• ▹Implement generative AI capabilities: automated test case generation, smart failure triage, self-healing test scripts, dynamic edge-case synthesis
• ▹Own runtime quality strategy for low-latency, high-throughput C/Lua/Rust data planes
• ▹Oversee architectural evolution of CI/CD pipelines and testing frameworks (GitHub Actions, Docker, K8s)
• ▹Drive quality ownership upstream (shift-left), embedding testability standards into architectural design
• ▹Define and monitor enterprise-grade QE metrics (CI signal reliability, automation coverage, defect density, time-to-triage, release stability)

Requirements

• ▹10+ years in Software Engineering / SDET, with a proven track record building enterprise test automation systems
• ▹4+ years in Engineering Management, directly 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) to software quality or developer workflows
• ▹Demonstrated ability to manage 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 and chaos engineering (e.g. Gremlin, Litmus), load testing 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. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, its unified API and AI platform is Kong Konnect.