Senior Site Reliability Engineer

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
• 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 Senior SRE for Volcano, you will be the 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. 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
• Contribute to 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
• 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

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