Senior Software Engineer, Gateway

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:

Kong is an Open-Core project. Its foundation is the Open-source API Gateway. On top of that there is an Enterprise Gateway, which extends and improves it. The Enterprise Gateway is the central piece of the Kong ecosystem, which includes other pieces of software and infrastructure that add even more value.
Your main responsibility will be developing, maintaining and extending the Kong Gateway, on both its Open-source and the Enterprise versions. You will engage with the Open Source community, and work closely with other teams in the company to improve it. You will be responsible for building foundations for other teams and customers, discovering and producing cutting edge industry trends and use-cases.

What you'll be doing:

• Responsible for designing, building and maintaining API management software and its underlying stack.

• Architecture, design, and implement new innovative features including proxying capabilities, load balancing, databases support that extend Kong’s offering.

• Bugs troubleshooting, performance tuning and low-level optimizations. Engage with open source community and extend Kong core to support the latest industry trends.

• Fill the gaps between Kong and third-party deployment platforms and tooling.

• And any additional tasks required by manager.

What you'll bring:

• 5+ years of programming in server-side applications and components.

• Experience designing, prototyping, building and debugging applications that are highly scalable, distributed, reliable and resilient.

• Solid hands-on low-level technical expertise in Linux systems troubleshooting, and profiling.

• Experience in distributed systems, Linux networking stack and computer systems programming, Kong works with APIs on both L7 and L4 transports and protocols, so this expertise and knowledge are required.

• Comfortable working with a remotely distributed team.

• Strong sense of ownership and excellent verbal and written communication skills -- engineers at Kong write the documentation for their products

• Familiarity with AI LLM concepts and applications development

Bonus Points:

• Hands on experience with NGINX/OpenResty/Kong/LuaJIT.

• Hands on experience with Envoy or Istio.

• Hands on experience with Rust

#LI-SV1

About Kong:

Kong Inc., a leading developer of cloud API technologies, is on a mission to enable companies around the world to become “API-first” and securely accelerate AI adoption. Kong helps organizations globally — from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises — unleash developer productivity, build securely, and accelerate time to market. For more information about Kong, please visit www.konghq.com or follow us on X @thekonginc.