Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Kong
Project Volcano
$140-197k
Microservice API gateway
Posted today
Microservice API gateway
501-1000 employees
Posted today
$140-197k
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To build the nervous system that will safely and reliably connect all of humankind!
Role
Who you are
- 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
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
Our take
Kong provides a cutting-edge API and service lifecycle management platform tailored for modern architectures, such as microservices, containers, cloud, and serverless environments. With a focus on flexibility, scalability, speed, and performance, Kong allows developers and Global 5000 enterprises to securely connect and orchestrate microservice APIs for today's sophisticated applications.
The core products offered by Kong include an open-source API and Microservices management solution, Galileo, a platform for API analytics and debugging; Gelato, a platform for creating developed portals for PIs and Microservices; and API Marketplace, a hub for discovering and publishing cloud APIs. Additionally, the introduction of a new collection of AI plug-ins in Kong Gateway 3.6 enhances the platform's capabilities further, reinforcing its commitment to innovation and advancement.
In pursuit of growth, the company is prioritising expanding its marketing efforts, bolstering its customer service team, and accelerating product development. By focusing on these key areas, Kong aims to continue providing unparalleled solutions and support to its ever-expanding user base in the rapidly evolving landscape of modern application development.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Nov 2024
$175m
SERIES E
Feb 2021
$100m
SERIES D
Total funding: $345.6m
Company benefits
- Flexible time off: Take time to take care of yourself and the things that matter most
- Stock options: We want you to share in our success. That's why stock options are offered to most Kongers
- U-First Fridays: Get 4 hours a month for continuous learning with a book, podcast, or course of your choice
- Virtual events: Stay connected with Donut chats, trivia, fitness challenges, guided meditations, and more
- Dedicated unplug days: Silence those notifications. Enjoy some well-deserved long weekend where the entire team unplugs
- Home office stipend: Build a home office environment tailored to support your productivity
Company HQ
Rincon Hill, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Augusto Marietti
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously founded Mashape API Marketplace. Before Mashape, Augusto was an SF homeless immigrant from Italy.
Marco Palladino
(Co-Founder & CTO)Previously co-founded MemboxX, an online service for storing documents and small pieces of personal data.
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