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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.

Engineering Manager - Platform Services

About the Platform Team at Kong:

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.

The Platform Team is the backbone of Kongs infrastructure building and maintaining the critical services that power the entire Kong ecosystem. Our team owns authentication authorization search notifications audit logging and other foundational services that ensure Kongs products are secure scalable and reliable. These services process millions of requests daily and are trusted by some of the worlds most innovative companies.

About the role:

The Engineering Manager for the Platform Services team will lead a team of backend and platform engineers responsible for Kongs core infrastructure services including authentication authorization search notifications and audit logging. Youll be responsible for building and scaling a high-performing team driving technical execution and ensuring the reliability and security of services that underpin Kongs entire product portfolio. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems platform engineering and identity management combined with proven people management experience and the ability to deliver mission-critical services at scale.

What youll do:

• Lead mentor and grow a team of 8-12 platform and backend engineers across multiple service domains.

• Build a strong engineering culture focused on reliability security operational excellence and continuous improvement.

• Drive technical execution across authentication authorization search notifications and audit logging services.

• Partner with product managers to define roadmaps prioritize work and align team efforts with business objectives.

• Conduct regular 1:1s provide coaching and feedback and support career development for all team members.

• Lead hiring efforts to scale the team including defining role requirements conducting interviews and making hiring decisions.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams including Gateway Dev Portal Analytics and other product teams on platform integration.

• Establish engineering best practices for distributed systems security observability and incident response.

• Drive technical strategy and architectural decisions for platform services and infrastructure.

• Manage team performance through goal setting performance reviews and fostering accountability.

• Own incident response on-call rotations and operational excellence for critical platform services.

• Ensure compliance with security standards and regulatory requirements for authentication and audit systems.

• Communicate technical progress system health and strategic recommendations to senior leadership.

• Balance platform reliability and stability with delivering new features and capabilities.

• Advocate for the teams needs in terms of resources tooling and organizational support.

What youll bring:

• 3 years of engineering management experience leading teams of 5 engineers.

• 8 years of total software engineering experience with strong technical background in distributed systems platform engineering or backend services.

• Demonstrated success building and scaling high-performing engineering teams.

• Deep expertise in at least one area: identity and access management (IAM) distributed systems architecture or platform infrastructure.

• Strong experience with authentication and authorization technologies (OAuth 2.0 OIDC JWT SAML RBAC).

• Proven ability to drive execution on complex mission-critical systems with high availability requirements.

• Strong technical credibility with ability to engage in architecture discussions code reviews and technical decision-making.

• Experience hiring onboarding and developing engineers at different seniority levels.

• Strong communication skills with ability to influence across technical and non-technical audiences.

• Experience working in fast-paced environments and balancing competing priorities.

• Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and container orchestration (Kubernetes).

• Understanding of microservices architecture and API design best practices.

• Experience with high-throughput low-latency systems and performance optimization.

• Track record of fostering inclusive and collaborative team environments.

• Ability to provide technical guidance while empowering teams to make decisions.

• Experience managing globally distributed teams across multiple time zones.

Bonus Points:

• Experience managing teams building authentication authorization or identity management systems.

• Background as a platform engineer backend engineer or distributed systems engineer.

• Deep knowledge of Golang and experience with Go-based microservices at scale.

• Experience with search infrastructure (Elasticsearch OpenSearch) or event-driven architectures (Kafka).

• Understanding of audit logging compliance requirements and building systems for regulated environments.

• Experience with AWS services (DynamoDB RDS EKS Lambda Kinesis SQS/SNS).

• Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform Pulumi) and GitOps practices.

• Experience managing teams supporting multi-tenant SaaS or PaaS platforms.

• Background in security engineering or building security-critical systems.

• Experience with observability platforms (Datadog Prometheus Grafana OpenTelemetry).

• Understanding of service mesh technologies (Istio Linkerd) and mTLS.

• Experience managing teams through major migrations or platform re-architectures.

• Familiarity with Kongs products API Gateway technologies or developer platforms.

• Track record of technical writing conference speaking or thought leadership in platform engineering.

• Experience with performance management and difficult conversations.

• Active involvement in platform engineering or distributed systems communities.

• Knowledge of SRE practices and building reliable self-healing systems.

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