Senior Engineering Manager Test Function

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If you dont think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job please apply. Nobody checks every box - were looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas and have some interest and capabilities in others.

About the Role:

As the Senior Engineering Manager you will serve as the global leader for Quality Engineering across Kongs flagship runtime platforms (AI Gateway API Gateway Event Gateway and Mesh).

This is a high-visibility transformative leadership role. Beyond overseeing our distributed global SDET organization you will be the primary architect of Kongs next-generation AI-driven testing strategy. You will spearhead the transformation of our quality engineering function from traditional automation to an intelligent agentic self-healing test substrate using LLMs and automated prompt/agent loops to test the very infrastructure powering the AI era.

What Youll Do:

• Global Team Leadership & Operations: Lead mentor and grow a high-performing geographically distributed team of Software Development Engineers in Test (SDETs) across North America Europe and Asia.

• Architect the AI Testing Strategy: Define and execute the roadmap for integrating AI LLMs and autonomous test agents directly into our testing lifecycle. Implement generative AI capabilities for automated test case generation smart failure triage self-healing test scripts and dynamic edge-case synthesis.

• Own Runtimes Quality Strategy: Establish testing strategies for low-latency high-throughput C/Lua/Rust data planes.

• Modernize Frameworks & CI/CD Pipelines: Oversee the architectural evolution of our end-to-end performance regression and chaos-testing automation harnesses embedded within modern CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions Docker K8s).

• Shift-Left Quality & Governance: Drive quality ownership upstream. Partner closely with Software Engineering and Product Management to embed rigorous testability standards into initial architectural designs.

• Define Enterprise-Grade Metrics: Establish and monitor clear QE health indicators (e.g. CI signal reliability automation coverage defect density time-to-triage and release stability).
  

What Youll Bring:

• 10 Years in Software Engineering / SDET: Proven track record building and scaling enterprise software test automation systems.

• 4 Years in Engineering Management: Direct experience leading distributed or global software engineering/SDET teams.

• Hands-on AI Integration Vision: Proven experience applying LLMs Generative AI or autonomous agent frameworks (e.g. Model Context Protocol agentic tool-calling synthetic data generation) to software quality or developer workflows.

• Operational Excellence: Demonstrated ability to manage follow-the-sun operational cadence vendor partnerships and cross-timezone execution seamlessly.

Bonus Points:

• Direct experience testing high-performance networking data planes proxies or API Gateways (e.g. Kong NGINX Envoy).

• Background in performance chaos engineering (e.g. Gremlin Litmus) and load testing high-availability SaaS platforms.

• Active involvement or contributions to open-source quality frameworks or AI development tooling.

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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 Kongs 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 .

Required Experience:

Manager