Software Engineering Manager - Gateway - Milan

Are you ready to power the World's connections?

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.

About the role:

You will be the leader of a team that consolidates core engineering and maintenance for the Kong on-premise and hybrid products. This team is the technical interface with key customers. You need strong technical leadership and a solid background, so you are able to challenge and ensure that they are growing as engineers, making valuable contributions, and generally having a great experience in Kong. You will have the opportunity to influence the culture, facilitate technical delivery, and work with your team on strategy and execution.

What you'll be doing:

• Hire, mentor, and maintain healthy Engineering teams who value collaboration and innovation.

• Manage shift scheduling, measuring key performance indicators (KPIs), and training, assure high-quality work and SLA.

• Experience managing customer-facing, engineering support roles and has a breadth of experience across infrastructure, internal tooling, platforms, and on-premise products.

• Solid technical expertise for Linux systems troubleshooting, and profiling, experience with debugging tools such as gdb, systemtap, tcpdump, crash, or other.

• Own the customer escalation system technically, including collaboration with other departments, stakeholders (Sales, Customer Experience, Sales Engineering etc.) and where necessary customers.

• Leadership experience displaying ability to organize and prioritize complex problem resolution and bug fixes, debugging distributed services.

• Organize and manage your teams to fit constructively into the org as a whole and help the company succeed.

• Set and manage expectations with other engineering teams, senior management, and external stakeholders.

• Give constructive feedback to Engineers, conduct 1:1s, address inter-personal issues, and conduct reviews.

What you'll bring:

• 5+ years of managing maintenance or support teams and obsessing over

• customer experience.

• Experience doing reviews, hiring, comp.

• Experience managing remote teams and distributed workforce.

• Demonstrated leadership of Engineering teams.

• On-premise, cloud, and hybrid product background.

• Proven strong technical skills sets.

• Business fluent English language skills both written and verbal.

Bonus Points:

• Hands-on experience in building and maintaining NGINX/OpenResty backend services.

• Experience working in an Enterprise Software company.

• Experience in building and fostering an Open-Source community.

• Experience working on an infrastructure product line.

#LI-JF1

About 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. For more information about Kong, please visit www.konghq.com or follow us on X @thekonginc.