ppbAre you ready to unlock intelligence? /b /p h3About the Role: /h3 pAs 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). /p pThis 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. /p h3What You'll Do: /h3 ul lipbGlobal Team Leadership Operations: /b Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing, geographically distributed team of Software Development Engineers in Test (SDETs) across North America, Europe, and Asia. /p /li lipbArchitect the AI Testing Strategy: /b Define and execute the roadmap for integrating AI, LLMs, and autonomous test agents directly into our testing lifecycle. Implement generative AI capabilities for automated test case generation, smart failure triage, self-healing test scripts, and dynamic edge-case synthesis. /p /li lipbOwn Runtimes Quality Strategy: /b Establish testing strategies for low-latency, high-throughput C/Lua/Rust data planes. /p /li lipbModernize Frameworks CI/CD Pipelines: /b 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). /p /li lipbShift-Left Quality Governance: /b Drive quality ownership upstream.



Partner closely with Software Engineering and Product Management to embed rigorous testability standards into initial architectural designs. /p /li lipbDefine Enterprise-Grade Metrics: /b Establish and monitor clear QE health indicators (e.g., CI signal reliability, automation coverage, defect density, time-to-triage, and release stability).br/ /p /li /ul h3What You'll Bring: /h3 ul lipb10+ Years in Software Engineering / SDET: /b Proven track record building and scaling enterprise software test automation systems. /p /li lipb4+ Years in Engineering Management: /b Direct experience leading distributed or global software engineering/SDET teams. /p /li lipbHands-on AI Integration Vision: /b 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. /p /li lipbOperational Excellence: /b Demonstrated ability to manage follow-the-sun operational cadence, vendor partnerships, and cross-timezone execution seamlessly. /p /li /ul h3Bonus Points: /h3 ul lipDirect experience testing high-performance networking data planes, proxies, or API Gateways (e.g., Kong, NGINX, Envoy). /p /li lipBackground in performance, chaos engineering (e.g., Gremlin, Litmus), and load testing high-availability SaaS platforms. /p /li lipActive involvement or contributions to open-source quality frameworks or AI development tooling. /p /li /ul h3About Kong: /h3 pKong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic - on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit /p /p #J-*****-Ljbffr

📌 Senior Engineering Manager - Test Function (Milano)
🏢 Kong
📍 Milano