Engineering Manager, Managed Gateways Infrastructure

Are you ready to unlock intelligence? 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. The Mission Kong Cloud Gateways is Kong's foundational cloud-native SaaS platform, powering its managed API and AI Gateway offerings. It provides a multi-tenant control plane, automation, and platform services that let customers securely deploy, operate, and scale dedicated gateway infrastructure with the simplicity of a fully managed cloud service. Behind that experience sits a distributed platform responsible for provisioning, fleet management, software lifecycle, zero-downtime upgrades, observability, security, and multi-region operations across globally distributed cloud infrastructure - built to a target of 99.99% availability, balancing reliability, performance, operational excellence, and infrastructure efficiency at global SaaS scale. As a Software Engineering Manager for Managed Gateways Infrastructure, you will own and grow Kong's Bangalore-based engineering team, taking full accountability for this multi-tenant SaaS platform. Kong Cloud Gateways is growing 100% YoY, and as enterprises increasingly adopt AI alongside traditional APIs, this platform becomes an increasingly important part of Kong's API and AI strategy - every improvement in automation, scalability, and operational excellence you drive accelerates new platform capabilities and lets product teams innovate faster. Beyond the technical charter, you play a key role in shaping a dynamic engineering culture - one built on urgency, ownership, and first-principles thinking - as the team scales to match the pace of the business. This is a highly technical, hands-on leadership role - you're expected to stay close to the systems, dig into hard problems alongside your team, and not hesitate to get into the trenches when it matters. What You'll Do Own and grow Kong's Managed Gateways Infrastructure engineering team in Bangalore - scaling the team's capability, raising the technical bar, and staying hands-on in critical implementations and incidents, not just directing from a distance. Own the reliability and scalability of a multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure platform serving customers across regions and clouds - every architectural decision has to hold up under multi-tenant load, isolation, and blast-radius considerations, not just single-tenant assumptions. Drive 4-9s (99.99%+) availability across Kong's global infrastructure footprint - owning capacity, resilience, and failure-mode design across multi-region, multi-cloud deployments (AWS, Azure, GCP) so Cloud Gateways stays up for customers everywhere, at any scale. Act as a direct technical contributor when it counts - complex incidents, architecture reviews, and high-stakes implementations that materially move the needle on Managed Gateways' growth and reliability. Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team building and operating Kong's SaaS infrastructure for Managed Gateways, in direct support of our critical enterprise customer base globally. Architect and implement robust, scalable, and fault-tolerant cloud-native systems using technologies like Kubernetes, Golang, and major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP). Own the complete operational lifecycle end-to-end - infrastructure, reliability, on-call, incident response, and blameless post-mortems - as one integrated engineering charter, not a separate function. Drive developer delight and operational efficiency through automation, self-service tooling, and streamlined workflows for deploying and managing API gateways, while proactively preventing technical debt and reducing operational toil. Define, track, and report on key SLOs and SLIs, and advocate for architectural best practices that keep Managed Gateways performant and resilient as it scales. Collaborate