Senior Engineering Manager - Test Function

Kong Inc.

Job Overview

Location

Milan, Italy

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• As the Senior Engineering Manager, you will serve as the global leader for Quality Engineering across Kong’s flagship runtime platforms (AI Gateway, API Gateway, Event Gateway and Mesh).
• This is a high-visibility, transformative leadership role. Beyond overseeing our distributed global SDET organization, you will be the primary architect of Kong’s next-generation AI-driven testing strategy.
• You will spearhead the transformation of our quality engineering function from traditional automation to an intelligent, agentic, self-healing test substrate, using LLMs and automated prompt/agent loops to test the very infrastructure powering the AI era.
• You will lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing, geographically distributed team of Software Development Engineers in Test (SDETs) across North America, Europe, and Asia.
• You will define and execute the roadmap for integrating AI, LLMs, and autonomous test agents directly into our testing lifecycle.
• You will establish testing strategies for low-latency, high-throughput C/Lua/Rust data planes.
• You will oversee the architectural evolution of our end-to-end, performance, regression, and chaos-testing automation harnesses embedded within modern CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Docker, K8s).
• You will drive quality ownership upstream. Partner closely with Software Engineering and Product Management to embed rigorous testability standards into initial architectural designs.
• You will establish and monitor clear QE health indicators (e.g., CI signal reliability, automation coverage, defect density, time-to-triage, and release stability).

🎯 Requirements

• 10+ Years in Software Engineering / SDET: Proven track record building and scaling enterprise software test automation systems.
• 4+ Years in Engineering Management: Direct experience leading distributed or global software engineering/SDET teams.
• Hands-on AI Integration Vision: Proven experience applying LLMs, Generative AI, or autonomous agent frameworks (e.g., Model Context Protocol, agentic tool-calling, synthetic data generation) to software quality or developer workflows.
• Operational Excellence: Demonstrated ability to manage follow-the-sun operational cadence, vendor partnerships, and cross-timezone execution seamlessly.

🏖️ Benefits

• Competitive salary and benefits package.
• Opportunity to work with a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies.
• Collaborative and dynamic work environment.

Skills & Technologies

Rust

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub

Senior

Onsite

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Kong Inc.

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About Kong Inc.

Kong Inc. is a San Francisco-based software company that develops an open-source API gateway and service connectivity platform. The company offers Kong Gateway, Kong Mesh, and Konnect cloud services to manage, secure, and observe microservices and APIs across clouds and data centers. Founded in 2007 as Mashape, it rebranded to Kong in 2017. Kong’s technology provides traffic control, authentication, rate limiting, and analytics for modern distributed architectures, supporting organizations in digital transformation and cloud-native adoption.

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