Senior Software Engineer

About the role:

You will join the engineering team that builds the Kong AI gateway, empowering companies and developers around the world to govern every step of their AI & LLM based innovation.

As a Senior Software Engineer in the AI Gateway Team, you will be working on core features such as multi-LLM routing and balancing, semantic caching and routing, MCP, and more.

What you’ll be doing:

• Responsible for designing, building and maintaining API management software for AI and LLMs and its underlying stack.
• Architecture, design, and implement new innovative features including proxying capabilities, load balancing, databases support that extend Kong AI Gateway’s offering.
• Bugs troubleshooting, performance tuning and low-level optimizations.
• Fill the gaps between Kong and third-party deployment platforms and tooling.
• Mentor junior members of the team.
• Any additional tasks required by the 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
• Hands on experience with Rust

Bonus Points:

• Hands on experience with NGINX/OpenResty/Kong/LuaJIT.
• Hands on experience with Envoy or Istio.

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 or follow us on X @thekonginc.