Are you ready to unlock intelligence?
If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others.
About The Role:
Kong is building Project Volcano, an internal developer platform purpose-built for Kong's engineering ecosystem. Volcano will provide teams with on-demand preview environments, edge deployments, managed PostgreSQL, auth, realtime, and storage APIs all deeply integrated with Kong products.
As the Senior SRE for Volcano, you will be the reliability voice for this platform. This role is a strategic initiative driven by the Office of the CTO (OCTO). You will partner directly with engineering leadership to define the platform's reliability posture. This is a high-visibility, high-impact role with direct influence on Kong's next generation developer platform.
What You'll Do:
Own reliability for Volcano end-to-end: Define and drive SLOs, error budgets, and incident response practices for all Volcano services — edge deployments, managed Postgres, auth, realtime, storage, and the control plane.
Contribute to the platform's infrastructure: Design and build the multi-region Kubernetes infrastructure, networking, and data plane that powers Volcano's edge deployment pipeline and backend-as-a-service capabilities.
Build the GitOps and CI/CD backbone: Establish deployment automation, canary pipelines, and preview environment provisioning using ArgoCD, Helm, and Terraform/Terragrunt — setting patterns the broader team will follow.
Scale managed data services: Design, operate, and harden multi-tenant PostgreSQL clusters, Redis caching layers, and object storage — with a focus on data isolation, performance, and disaster recovery.
Drive observability from day one: Instrument every Volcano service with meaningful SLIs; build dashboards, alerts, and runbooks using Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana before services go live, not after incidents.
Lead cross-functional reliability work: Collaborate with the OCTO team, product engineering, and security to bake reliability and compliance into Volcano's architecture — not bolt it on later.
Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies: Given Volcano's greenfield nature, evaluate and make architectural decisions on edge runtimes, serverless compute, vector databases, and AI-native infrastructure components.
What You'll Bring:
BS in Computer Science or equivalent; substantial experience at Staff or Principal IC level in SRE/Platform Engineering.
Proven track record building SRE or platform engineering practices for developer-facing platforms or PaaS/SaaS products — ideally at greenfield stage.
Kubernetes expertise: multi-tenant cluster design, networking (CNI, service mesh, ingress), autoscaling, and security hardening.
#LI-BR2
About Kong:
Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong’s unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.
Skills Required
- Bachelor of Science in Computer Science or equivalent
- Substantial experience at the Staff or Principal individual contributor level in SRE or Platform Engineering
- Proven track record building SRE or platform engineering practices for developer-facing platforms or PaaS/SaaS products
- Experience building SRE or platform engineering practices at the greenfield stage
- Kubernetes expertise, including multi-tenant cluster design, networking, CNI, service mesh, ingress, autoscaling, and security hardening
Kong Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Kong and has not been reviewed or approved by Kong.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Flexible PTO, company-wide Unplug Days, and a four‑week paid sabbatical after five years are prominently offered to support rest and work–life balance. These programs are presented as meaningful perks beyond base pay and are highlighted across official materials and third‑party summaries.
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Healthcare Strength — U.S. medical, dental, and vision coverage is described as strong, with plan quality drawing positive sentiment. Solid healthcare appears to contribute meaningfully to overall satisfaction with the total package.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Stock options are offered to most employees, creating ownership upside alongside cash compensation. Equity is positioned as a visible component that helps keep offers competitive for certain technical and go‑to‑market roles.
Kong Insights
What We Do
Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the connectivity layer for AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and AI-native startups alike, Kong’s unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. No AI without APIs.
Why Work With Us
It starts with how we show up for each other. We’ve created a workplace that’s intentionally flexible, deeply inclusive, and built for meaningful collaboration — whether virtual or in person. We trust our teams to own their work, and we give them the support, tools, and freedom to grow.
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