About the role
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: You will report to the Kong AI Gateway engineering lead and lead the Shanghai engineering team, empowering companies and developers around the world to govern every step of their AI & LLM based innovation. You will need strong technical leadership and a solid background in AI and LLM technologies, so you are able to technically challenge engineers and ensure that they keep growing, make valuable contributions, and generally have a great experience in Kong. You will have the opportunity to influence the culture, facilitate technical delivery, and work with your team on strategy and execution. What you'll be doing: Hire, mentor, and maintain healthy Engineering teams who value collaboration and innovation. Manage work assignments, measure key performance indicators (KPIs), assure high-quality work and SLA. Own the customer escalation system technically, including collaboration with other departments, stakeholders (Sales, Customer Experience, Sales Engineering etc.) and where necessary customers. 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 1:1s, address inter-personal issues, and conduct performance reviews. What you'll bring: 5+ years of managing engineering teams and obsessing over customer experience Solid technical expertise for AI and LLM in one or more of the following: APIs, models and consumption models for different providers Self-hosted models RAG and Vector Databases MCP Experience doing reviews, hiring, comp Experience managing remote teams and distributed workforce Demonstrated leadership of Engineering teams On-premise, cloud and hybrid product background Proven customer relationship skills sets Business fluent English language skills both written and verbal Bonus Points: Hands-on experience in building and maintaining NGINX/OpenResty backend services Experience working in an Enterprise Software company Experience working on Rust projects #LI-CL1 About Kong: Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit www.konghq.com .