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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 Staff SRE for Volcano, you will be the founding 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, build its SRE practice from the ground up, and ensure Volcano can scale to serve all of Kong's customers. 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.
Architect 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.
Set SRE culture and standards: Mentor engineers across Volcano's contributing teams on reliability principles; lead postmortems, define on-call practices, and build a blameless engineering culture.
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.
Deep Kubernetes expertise: multi-tenant cluster design, networking (CNI, service mesh, ingress), autoscaling, and security hardening.
About Kong:
Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.
Skills Required
- 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
- Deep Kubernetes expertise
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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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is considered competitive for many roles, particularly in senior and technical positions, with bonuses and overtime enhancing earnings for some. Compensation is generally described as strong across a range of functions.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Policies such as flexible time off, company Unplug Days, U‑First Fridays, and a paid sabbatical create multiple avenues for rest and personal development. These offerings support work‑life balance for a distributed workforce.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Stock options and an employee stock purchase plan enable broad participation in company equity. Equity is positioned as a meaningful component of total rewards alongside cash compensation.
Kong Insights
What We Do
Kong Inc., a leading developer of cloud API technologies, is on a mission to enable companies around the world to become “API-first” and securely accelerate AI adoption. Kong helps organizations globally — from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises — unleash developer productivity, build securely and accelerate time to market.
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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