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:

• 4+ years of Eng. management experience.
• Experience managing remote teams.
• 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.

About Kong: Kong is THE cloud native API platform with the fastest, most adopted API gateway in the world (over 300m downloads!). As the innovation leader of cloud API technologies, Kong 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 to market. 83% of web traffic today is API calls! APIs are the connective tissue of the cloud and the underlying technology that allows software to talk and interact with one another. Therefore, we believe that APIs act as the nervous system of the cloud. Our audacious mission is to build the nervous system that will safely and reliably connect all of humankind! For more information about Kong, please visit konghq.com or follow @thekonginc on Twitter. We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status. #LI-CL1