Senior Software Engineering Manager, Managed Gateways SREs

Ovii's Interpretation of the Role

Senior Software Engineering Manager leading Kong's Managed Gateways SRE organization. Build and scale a high‑performing, hands‑on SRE team that ensures 99.99%+ uptime for critical API gateway services across global customers.

Role Snapshot

• Lead & build a new SRE team from the ground up
• Hands‑on reliability engineering for managed gateway services
• Design cloud‑native, highly‑available systems
• Own incident response, post‑mortems and continuous improvement
• Drive automation, self‑service tooling and developer delight
• Define, track and report SLO/SLI metrics
• Collaborate across product, engineering and support

Must-Have Requirements

• lead SRE or DevOps teams
• design and operate highly available distributed systems on cloud platforms
• extensive production Kubernetes experience
• proficiency in Golang for infrastructure automation
• strong observability knowledge (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry)
• incident management and root‑cause analysis
• leading SRE/DevOps teams
• hands‑on cloud‑native system design
• production Kubernetes operations

Nice-to-Have Signals

• familiarity with API gateway technologies or service mesh
• open‑source contributions to SRE/cloud‑native ecosystems
• cloud platform certifications (AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, CKA, CKAD)
• open‑source community involvement
• cloud certifications
• developer‑tool or API‑management background

Work Setup

• Location: Washington, United States
• Work mode: REMOTE
• Remote scope: UNSPECIFIED
• Remote countries: United States, Washington, United States
• Employment type: Full-Time

Not Specified in JD

• Visa sponsorship
• Salary range
• Remote eligibility details
• Education requirement
• Certifications (optional)
• Relocation
• Travel
• Security clearance
• Coding test

What You'll Likely Work On

• Recruit, hire and set performance standards for a new SRE team in Seattle/Washington
• Contribute directly to critical reliability implementations during early team ramp‑up
• Architect and deploy fault‑tolerant, cloud‑native services using Kubernetes and Go
• Manage the full operational lifecycle: monitoring, alerting, incident response, blameless post‑mortems
• Create automation and self‑service tooling to reduce operational toil
• Establish, monitor and report on SLOs/SLIs for Managed Gateways
• Partner with product, engineering and support to ensure operational readiness of new features

Good Fit If You Have

• Open‑source contributions to SRE or cloud‑native projects
• Cloud platform certifications (e.g., AWS DevOps Engineer, CKA/CKAD)
• Background in developer‑tool or API‑management companies