Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Are you ready to power the World's connections?

About the role

Kong API Gateway is the most popular open-source API gateway, adopted by tens of thousands of organizations. This is a new team that we are bootstrapping to develop a new product called “Serverless Gateways,” which offers the power of a mature API Gateway with no operational burden of any sort. The end-user has to click a few buttons to provision a new API Gateway, and they can start using it. There is no need to scale, upgrade, or manage anything. This is similar to other “serverless” offerings. Serverless products from Amazon or budding startups are an excellent example of what we wish to build as well.

This team is central to the next growth phase of Kong Inc.

Some problems that you will solve when you come on board:

• Keeping tens of thousands of VMs or containers running smooth across the globe.
• Figure out how to quickly provision VMs or containers as customers sign up or interact with Konnect Cloud.
• Figure out how to leverage Firecracker or a similar stack to operate these VMs or containers efficiently.
• Figure out how to scale these VMs up and down. Kong can be configured using thousands of knobs, and we need to build something that accounts for all setups.
• We must figure out how to route traffic, terminate TLS, and manage DNS. Networking is at the heart of what Kong does.
• Figure out how to scale to zero for inactive customers. Our business makes money, so cost is an essential factor. If we scale to zero, figure out how to reduce or eliminate the cold start penalty. Our customers are very sensitive to high latencies.
• Figure out how to make Redis multi-tenant and operate Redis clusters at scale.
• Do all of the above with or without Kubernetes. We have a complicated relationship with Kubernetes.
• Most importantly, do all of the above while sleeping peacefully at night. Developing a robust solution that thousands of open-source users can use is critical to our team's success.




• We love to work together, so this opportunity is a hybrid one. What does that mean? We come to the office three days a week and work from home the other two days. Life happens, and we are totally cool if you need to work remotely sometime.

You can find a few more details on what kind of background we are looking for:

• Communication skills. We care a lot about how you interact with other people enough to put this at the top of this list.
• Prior operations (DevOps/SRE) experience. Building this system is one thing, but operating it successfully at scale is another, and the latter is much more critical with this product.
• Experience with public cloud providers like AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• We program in Go. Prior experience in a similar language is good, but we don’t care if you have used Go before. 
• Experience with monitoring systems like Prometheus or Victoria Metrics, tools like Vector, streaming platforms like Kafka, and databases like Postgres will help you. This is our stack internally.
• 8+ years working in a team to develop, deliver, and maintain complex software solutions.
• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science.
• And any additional tasks necessary to make the team and the product successful.

Bonus Points:

• You have built and managed offerings for internal or external customers. Offerings could be databases, gateways, caches, search engines, etc. Experience running single-tenant infrastructure for each customer 
• Deep experience with application-level networking. We love our HTTP and DNS.
• You have worked with Kong Gateway before.