Guanlan Dai

CTO

San Francisco, California, United States11 yrs 2 mos experience

Highly Stable

Key Highlights

Led teams handling 400B+ API calls daily.
Established Kong China from scratch, driving significant growth.
Major contributor to Cloudflare's Edge platform development.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS expert with extensive experience in API management and high-performance infrastructure.

Contact

Skills

Other Skills

PythonLinuxC++CJavaSQLDatabasesOpen SourceWeb DevelopmentSoftware DesignCloud ComputingUnixTCP/IPScalabilityNetwork Security

About

As a founding engineering leader at Kong, Guanlan leads multiple global teams driving the full lifecycle development of Kong’s API and AI management product: handling 400B+ API calls daily, serving 700+ enterprise customers, and boasting 40,000+ GitHub stars. His portfolio includes launching Kong Gateway, Kong Cloud, Kubernetes Ingress Controller, and the LLM Gateway, powering a $100M+ ARR business. Before Kong, Guanlan was one of the earliest engineers (#4) on Cloudflare’s Edge team and later led the Edge Platform team. He architected and optimized critical high-performance SaaS infrastructure: including CDN, WAF, and Front Line, that supports over 10 trillion monthly requests, about 20% of global Internet traffic, from more than 2.5 billion users across 118 data centers worldwide. He was a major contributor to the OpenResty project.

Experience

11 yrs 2 mos

Total Experience

5 yrs 7 mos

Average Tenure

Current Experience

Kong inc.

4 roles

Site Lead

Dec 2021 – Oct 2025 · 3 yrs 10 mos

Established and scaled Kong China from scratch: hiring, operations, branding and strategic planning.
Leading a 60+ engineers organization across 5 core product teams powering a $100M ARR business: driving development of API Gateway, LLM Gateway, Gateway UI, Kubernetes, and Insomnia

Director of Engineering

Promoted

Oct 2021 – Oct 2025 · 4 yrs

Leader of Kong runtimes: Gateway, Mesh, KIC, LLM Gateway
Handling 400B+ API calls daily, trusted by 600+ enterprise customers worldwide.

Senior Engineering Manager

Promoted

Jan 2018 – Oct 2021 · 3 yrs 9 mos

As the first Engineering Manager of Kong, my jobs are building systems and infrastructure teams and shipping API/microservices products from the ground up, and make sure they are able to scale.
Core, Kubernetes Teams
Managing the OSS side of engineering teams, owning the Kong Gateway OSS and Kubernetes Ingress products (Github 40,000+ stars, 250M downloads, https://github.com/Kong/kong)
Building world-class engineering teams across 5 countries from North America, South America, Europe, and Asia.
Setting technical direction, managing and assigning tasks to team members, and escalating risks and blockers.
Cloud, Machine Learning/AI Team
Launched the Kong Cloud service, a fully managed platform for securing, connecting, and orchestrating APIs.
Assembled a great engineering team from zero and built the MVP of AI-driven products of Kong Brain and Immunity.

Technical Lead

Oct 2017 – Jan 2018 · 3 mos

Joined as a founding team member following the pivot from Mashape; led architecture for Gateway, Service Mesh and Cloud initiatives.

Cloudflare, inc.

2 roles

Technical Lead

Promoted

Aug 2014 – Oct 2017 · 3 yrs 2 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Led the engineering team in the end-to-end development of Cloudflare Edge platform:
Delivered SaaS features including Argo Tiered Cache, Frontline Cache, Flexible Purge, and Strong Etag etc., based on NGINX and LuaJIT.
Extended and optimized Cloudflare core components include FL, WAF, Edge Side Code, and CDN Cache which used by 6 million websites and proxying ~10% of global Internet web requests each day.
Built testing, analysis, and diagnostics tools for edge networks.

Systems Engineer

Jun 2013 – Aug 2013 · 2 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Joined as the #4 developer on Cloudflare edge team
Developed real-time analysis and diagnostics systemtap toolkit for NGINX and LuaJIT.
Built GDB extension scripts in both the GDB command language and Python to automate core dump file analysis for crashes.
Developed new features for the Nginx Lua module written in C, which powers CloudFlare's CDN and WAF systems.
Optimized Lua libraries according to the profiling results in Flame Graphs.