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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 Kong's 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 Kong's products are secure, scalable, and reliable. These services process millions of requests daily and are trusted by some of the world's 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 Kong's core infrastructure services including authentication, authorization, search, notifications, and audit logging. You'll be responsible for building and scaling a high-performing team, driving technical execution, and ensuring the reliability and security of services that underpin Kong's 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 you'll 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 team's needs in terms of resources, tooling, and organizational support.

What you'll 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 Kong's 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.

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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, Kong's 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 www.konghq.com.