Senior Engineering Manager - Test Function
Leads a global quality engineering organization and defines Kong’s AI-driven testing strategy across gateway and mesh runtime platforms. The role requires 10+ years in software engineering or SDET, 4+ years in engineering management, and hands-on experience applying AI or autonomous agents to quality workflows.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Lead, mentor, and grow a geographically distributed team of Software Development Engineers in Test (SDETs) across North America, Europe, and Asia.
- Define and execute a roadmap for integrating AI, LLMs, and autonomous test agents into the testing lifecycle.
- Implement generative AI capabilities for automated test-case generation, failure triage, self-healing test scripts, and dynamic edge-case synthesis.
- Establish testing strategies for low-latency, high-throughput C, Lua, and Rust data planes.
- Oversee the evolution of end-to-end, performance, regression, and chaos-testing automation harnesses within modern CI/CD pipelines.
- Drive quality ownership upstream by partnering with Software Engineering and Product Management on testability standards.
- Establish and monitor quality engineering metrics, including CI signal reliability, automation coverage, defect density, time to triage, and release stability.
- Manage follow-the-sun operational cadence, vendor partnerships, and cross-time-zone execution.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering or SDET, with a track record of building and scaling enterprise software test-automation systems.
- 4+ years of experience in engineering management.
- Experience leading distributed or global software engineering or SDET teams.
- Experience applying LLMs, generative AI, or autonomous agent frameworks to software quality or developer workflows.
- Experience with Model Context Protocol, agentic tool calling, or synthetic data generation.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience testing high-performance networking data planes, proxies, or API gateways, such as Kong, NGINX, or Envoy.
- Background in performance testing, chaos engineering, or load testing high-availability SaaS platforms.
- Experience with Gremlin or Litmus.
- Contributions to open-source quality frameworks or AI development tooling.
Compensation and Benefits
- Compensation and benefits information was not provided.
Skills
LLMs, Generative AI, Autonomous Agents, Model Context Protocol, Synthetic Data Generation, C, Lua, Rust, GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Chaos Engineering, Gremlin, Litmus
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