---
title: 'Site Reliability Engineer at Kong'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/site-reliability-engineer-kong-milan-dwpd1pcheb6e'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Site Reliability Engineer at Kong

- **Company:** [Kong](https://feeny.ai/companies/kong)
- **Location:** Milan, Italy
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-07-31
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kong/a1123b02-9099-443a-94e5-249b49e55acb

## Job description

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: The Site Reliability Engineering team is the backbone of Kong's cloud services, responsible for architecting and operating the large-scale infrastructure that powers our customers' most critical applications. Our mission is to achieve world-class reliability and performance, enabling our product engineering teams to ship features with velocity and confidence. We are the guardians of uptime and the champions of developer delight.

What You’ll Do:

- Build and maintain our core infrastructure as code using tools like Terraform and Ansible.
- Implement robust monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to ensure our services meet and exceed 99.99% uptime.
- Resolve production incidents through systematic debugging, and drive the blameless post-mortem process to prevent recurrence.
- Write automation to reduce operational toil, improve system efficiency, and enable self-service for engineering teams.
- Collaborate with developers to embed reliability and scalability best practices directly into the application lifecycle.
- Contribute to our capacity planning, disaster recovery drills, and security hardening processes.
- Participate in a fair and sustainable on-call rotation to ensure our platform is always available.

What You’ll Bring:

- Experience operating production workloads on a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure).
- Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language, such as Golang, Python, or Bash.
- Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code principles and tools (Terraform is a plus).
- Familiarity with CI/CD concepts and pipeline tools (e.g., GitLab CI, Jenkins).
- An understanding of modern observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).

## #LI-BR2

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](http://www.konghq.com).

## About Kong

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Kong provides a unified API and AI platform that connects, secures, and manages APIs, events, and AI agents for modern architectures.
- **Entity Type**: Private – Series E, post‑money valuation $2B (2023)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2017 (company formalized; roots as Mashape go back to 2009)
- **Founders**: Augusto “Aghi” Marietti (CEO) and Marco Palladino (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: API management, AI connectivity, cloud infrastructure
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises, platform engineering teams, developers, and product managers building API‑driven or AI‑agent applications
- **Mission / Purpose**: To be the AI connectivity company – enabling organizations to connect, govern, and monetize APIs, events, and AI workloads at scale.

## Products & Services
- **[Kong Konnect](https://konghq.com/)**: Managed, unified API and AI platform covering the full lifecycle – design, test, publish, govern, monetize – across any cloud or environment. SaaS.
- **[Kong Gateway](https://konghq.com/)**: Open‑source (and enterprise) API gateway, the world’s most adopted, used for traffic management, security, and observability. Open‑source hybrid.
- **[Kong AI Gateway](https://konghq.com/)**: Extension for managing and securing AI traffic – token consumption, cost control, and agent governance. SaaS / add‑on.
- **[Kong Mesh](https://konghq.com/)**: Enterprise service mesh for Kubernetes and VMs (based on Kuma, donated to CNCF). Infrastructure.
- **[Insomnia](https://konghq.com/)**: API design and testing tool (acquired and integrated into the Kong ecosystem). Desktop / CLI.
- **[OpenMeter](https://konghq.com/)**: Usage‑based billing, entitlements, and invoicing for APIs, events, and AI (acquired 2025). SaaS.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: $2 billion (as of late 2023 Series E round) – not publicly traded.
- **Key Metric**: Surpassed **$100M ARR** in late 2023; processes **+1 trillion API/AI requests per day**; **600+ employees** in 25+ countries (LinkedIn reports 738 employees with +23.5% YoY growth).
- **Total Funding**: **$344.1M** across 6 rounds (including Series D $100M at $1.4B, and Series E $175M led by new investors).
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Include large institutional investors; partners include cloud providers and enterprises such as United Airlines (cited as customer). Open‑source community with 182K+ community users.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Most adopted open‑source API gateway** – strong developer mindshare and large community.
- **Unified platform** covering the entire API lifecycle plus AI agent management, reducing fragmentation for enterprises.
- **High‑performance, low‑latency** – proven at hyper‑volume (+1T requests/day), 99.99% availability SLA.
- **Strategic acquisitions** (Kuma, Insomnia, OpenMeter) that plug gaps in service mesh, developer tooling, and usage‑based billing.
- **Strong enterprise DNA** – trusted by global brands for mission‑critical applications.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI connectivity** – building the layer to manage LLM traffic, agent security, token cost, and real‑time data streams.
- **Monetization** – enabling customers to monetize APIs and AI consumption (chargeback, entitlements, pricing).
- **Developer productivity** – accelerating onboarding and reducing costs (claims 15% faster development, 57% operational cost reduction).
- **Global scale** – growing remote workforce and entering new geographic markets (e.g., Italy, ANZ roles posted).

## Why Work Here
- **Remote‑first culture** – 600+ employees across 25+ countries; strong emphasis on global collaboration.
- **Perks & benefits** (from [careers page](https://konghq.com/company/careers)):
  - Stock options for most employees
  - 4‑week paid sabbatical every 5 years
  - Flexible time off
  - Home office stipend
  - Regular “unplug days” (company‑wide long weekends)
  - Virtual events (Donut chats, trivia, fitness challenges)
- **Engineering culture** – values “owners, explorers, real, unstoppable” and encourages individual innovation. Focus on shipping fast and high trust.
- **Growth trajectory** – company is scaling (+23.5% headcount YoY) and is a unicorn with clear product‑market fit in a hot market (AI + API management).
- **Open roles** – 93 open positions across engineering, sales, solutions, customer success, and marketing.

## Sources
1. [konghq.com](https://konghq.com/)
2. [konghq.com/company/careers](https://konghq.com/company/careers)
3. [konghq.com/company/about-us](https://konghq.com/company/about-us)
4. [linkedin.com/company/konghq](https://www.linkedin.com/company/konghq)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/kong](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kong)

## Other roles at Kong

- [Senior Technical Customer Success Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-technical-customer-success-manager-kong-texas-ytqxg9d6sqp1) — Texas, United States
- [Staff Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-forward-deployed-engineer-kong-california-r06a36wa37mh) — California, United States
- [Senior Staff Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-forward-deployed-engineer-kong-california-fz66z8w2anb4) — California, United States
- [Renewal Account Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/renewal-account-manager-kong-singapore-syrs38z7qw9z) — Singapore
- [Staff Technical Customer Success Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-technical-customer-success-manager-kong-california-g18831yc2z0p) — California, United States
- [Site Reliability Engineer 2, Managed Gateways](https://feeny.ai/job/site-reliability-engineer-2-managed-gateways-kong-bengaluru-b9a6d345xvrw) — Bengaluru, India
- [Senior Field Sales Enablement Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-field-sales-enablement-manager-kong-singapore-tjt4kh96a7dy) — Singapore
- [Strategic Account Director – PSU/Government](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-account-director-psu-government-kong-delhi-p8rer2gf3ha9) — Delhi, India
- [GTM Sourcing Recruiter (Contract)](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-sourcing-recruiter-contract-kong-united-states-kq45jbkatvsa) — United States
- [GTM Technical Sourcing Recruiter (Contract)](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-technical-sourcing-recruiter-contract-kong-united-states-svmx5vae8mje) — United States