Senior Engineering Manager - Test Function
At a glance
Senior Engineering Leadership role at Kong. England · full-time · no salary stated · we estimate £70,150–£120,000 across the United Kingdom.
Kong has not published a salary for this role. The figure below is our estimate, not theirs.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Lead and develop SDETs working across North America, Europe and Asia
- Build the roadmap for using LLMs and autonomous agents in testing, including case creation and failure triage
- Set quality plans for C, Lua and Rust data planes designed for low latency and high throughput
- Guide improvements to end-to-end, performance, regression and chaos test systems within CI/CD pipelines
- Work with engineering and product teams to set testability expectations early and track quality measures
What you bring
- At least ten years in software engineering or SDET work, including building and scaling enterprise test automation
- Four or more years managing engineering teams, with experience leading people across regions or time zones
- Applied LLMs, generative AI or autonomous agents to software quality or developer workflows
- Experience coordinating follow-the-sun operations, vendor relationships and work across time zones
Who this fits
This is a senior engineering management role leading a distributed SDET team and setting quality strategy across several runtime platforms. The role is based in England, United Kingdom, with a hybrid work arrangement.
From the employer
Are you ready to unlock intelligence?
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 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).
This 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.
What You’ll Do:
Global Team Leadership & Operations: Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing, geographically distributed team of Software Development Engineers in Test (SDETs) across North America, Europe, and Asia.
Architect the AI Testing Strategy: 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.
Own Runtimes Quality Strategy: Establish testing strategies for low-latency, high-throughput C/Lua/Rust data planes.
Modernize Frameworks & CI/CD Pipelines: 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).
Shift-Left Quality & Governance: Drive quality ownership upstream. Partner closely with Software Engineering and Product Management to embed rigorous testability standards into initial architectural designs.
Define Enterprise-Grade Metrics: Establish and monitor clear QE health indicators (e.g., CI signal reliability, automation coverage, defect density, time-to-triage, and release stability).
What You’ll Bring:
10+ Years in Software Engineering / SDET: Proven track record building and scaling enterprise software test automation systems.
4+ Years in Engineering Management: Direct experience leading distributed or global software engineering/SDET teams.
Hands-on AI Integration Vision: 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.
Operational Excellence: Demonstrated ability to manage follow-the-sun operational cadence, vendor partnerships, and cross-timezone execution seamlessly.
Bonus Points:
Direct experience testing high-performance networking data planes, proxies, or API Gateways (e.g., Kong, NGINX, Envoy).
Background in performance, chaos engineering (e.g., Gremlin, Litmus), and load testing high-availability SaaS platforms.
Active involvement or contributions to open-source quality frameworks or AI development tooling.
About Kong:
Kong 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 www.konghq.com.
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