Senior Software Development Engineer in Test

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 Platform Team at Kong

The Platform Team is the backbone of Kong's infrastructure, building and maintaining the critical services that power the entire Kong ecosystem. Our team owns authentication, authorization, search, notifications, audit logging, and other foundational services that ensure Kong's products are secure, scalable, and reliable. These services process millions of requests daily and are trusted by some of the world's most innovative companies.

About the role:

The Senior Software Engineer in Test is an integral part of the scrum team, participating in all sprint activities and contributing to the overall quality of the finished feature by being involved from the earliest stages of design and development through verification, deployment, and production support. You'll be instrumental in ensuring the reliability, security, and performance of platform services that are critical to Kong's entire product portfolio.

What you'll do:

• Help build an engineering culture that enables quality in all software feature development teams across the company.
• Develop and execute comprehensive test strategies for platform services including authentication, authorization, search, notifications, and audit logging systems.
• Design and implement automated testing frameworks for backend services, APIs, and distributed systems.
• Make frequent contributions to our test automation harness as part of the continuous integration pipeline.
• Design test cases and execute various tests, including functional, integration, end-to-end, security, load, and performance testing for high-availability platform services.
• Build tools and frameworks to support automated testing, chaos engineering, and performance testing of our platform infrastructure.
• Develop and maintain security testing practices for authentication and authorization systems, including penetration testing and vulnerability assessments.
• Interact and participate in meetings with key stakeholders, team members, and internal users regarding timelines and technical issues.
• Mentor and guide other Quality Engineering team members and technical and non-technical staff members.

• Collaborate with SRE and DevOps teams to implement observability and monitoring for test environments.

What you'll bring

• 5+ years of software testing experience with at least 3 years focused on backend services, distributed systems, or platform infrastructure.
• Functional testing experience, including defining test strategy, test planning, test case design, execution, and reporting.
• Expertise with automated testing tools and strategies for backend services and APIs.
• Strong programming skills in one or more languages such as Go or JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Deep understanding of testing authentication and authorization systems (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, SAML, RBAC, etc.).
• Experience testing distributed systems, message queues, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with API testing frameworks and tools (REST, GraphQL, gRPC).
• Recent exposure to a startup environment building and contributing to a test framework, including automation, from the ground up.
• Solid understanding of various test frameworks and automation of backend systems and microservices.
• Experience with Continuous Integration/Delivery concepts and tools, such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar.
• Experience with performance engineering, profiling, and load testing tools such as k6, JMeter, Gatling, or Locust.
• Experience working with globally distributed teams.

• Demonstrated skills using code repositories and Atlassian tools (GitHub, JIRA, Confluence, or similar tools).

Bonus Points

• Experience testing search infrastructure and query systems (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, or similar).
• Knowledge of security testing methodologies and tools (OWASP, Burp Suite, ZAP).
• Experience with chaos engineering and fault injection testing.
• Experience with observability tools and practices (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK stack).
• Knowledge of database testing (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB).
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or Pulumi.
• Experience with containers (Docker) and container orchestration systems (ECS, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm/Data Center, EKS, GKE).
• Experience measuring and testing quality for high-availability PaaS or SaaS offerings.
• Experience working with Cloud Platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience testing notification systems and event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SNS/SQS).
• Experience testing audit logging and compliance systems.
• Knowledge of service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd).

• Familiarity with rate limiting, throttling, and quota management testing.

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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.