Director of Engineering, Gateway Runtime - Shanghai

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

As a leader of the Kong Gateway engineering Runtime team, you will play a key role in shaping the future of API management by delivering superior performance and stability. Your team will be responsible for advancing core proxy functionalities, including improvements to DNS, load balancing, routing, plugin framework, and more.

Key responsibilities include:

• Re-architecting and refactoring the gateway runtime to support the future evolution of Kong.

• Owning and executing the roadmap for performance tuning and optimizations.

• Leading the development of profiling and debugging tools and frameworks, focusing on CPU, memory, and latency metrics.

• Your leadership will drive innovation and ensure Kong continues to set the industry standard in API management with cutting-edge performance and reliability.

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 1:1’s, address inter-personal issues, and conduct reviews.

• Suggest Engineering guidelines, principles and processes to improve the Engineering org.

• Assure high quality work and SLA adherence from the entire Engineering org.

What you'll bring

• Deep, hands-on experience building and scaling infrastructure products from the ground up: you’ve done this before and know what both success and misfires look like.

• Demonstrated success operating and scaling engineering teams within fast-paced, high-growth environments.

• 8+ years of experience in engineering management

• 4+ years of experience being a manager of managers

• Experience managing remote teams and distributed workforce.

• Experience doing reviews, hiring, comp.

• Demonstrated leadership of Engineering teams.

• Proven customer relationship skills sets.

• On-premise, cloud and hybrid product background.

• Experience working on an infrastructure product line.

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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.