Sr. Software Engineer

Overview

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’s Managed Gateways are at the heart of our API Management suite, Konnect. With two complementary offerings—Dedicated Cloud Gateways and Serverless Gateways—we’re building a next-generation platform that powers secure, scalable, and high-performance API traffic for customers across the globe.

• Dedicated Cloud Gateways provide organizations with a fully managed, private, and isolated gateway environment that eliminates the complexity of managing infrastructure while ensuring security and compliance. Designed for high performance and scalability, these gateways allow businesses to control traffic flow across their services without sharing resources with other customers.
• Serverless Gateways offer a fully managed, elastic API gateway solution that meets traffic demands without the need for provisioning or managing any underlying infrastructure. Built to simplify operations and reduce costs, these gateways empower organizations to deploy APIs seamlessly in serverless environments, ensuring efficient resource utilization.
  
  

This is a unique opportunity to join early in the product evolution of a key Kong growth bet that is already clocking double-digit YoY adoption. You’ll work on distributed systems, multi-cloud networking, and API infrastructure that form the backbone of modern digital businesses.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll not only build critical components of the Managed Gateways platform, but also take ownership of major features end-to-end, lead technical execution within the team, and mentor peers. You’ll collaborate with product managers, architects, and other engineers to shape the technical direction and ensure the platform delivers 99.99% uptime, performance, and developer delight.

What You'll Do

• Design, develop, and operate highly available distributed systems for Managed Gateways, ensuring resilience to regional and zonal outages.
• Own and lead delivery of key features/modules, driving them from design through implementation and production rollout.
• Build microservices and control-plane components that power Kong’s Dedicated Cloud Gateways and Serverless Gateways.
• Partner with Product and Engineering teams to deliver new features at scale that directly impact customers’ ability to build, secure, and manage APIs.
• Participate in on-call rotations, owning services in production and driving reliability improvements.
• Write automated tests, observability hooks, and tooling to ensure reliability and reduce toil.
• Assist in the hiring process and help grow and mentor engineers on the team.
• Contribute to shaping the technical roadmap for Managed Gateways, bringing in ideas from infrastructure, networking, and platform engineering.
• Work in a high-velocity, pre-IPO environment, balancing innovation with reliability and customer impact.
  
  

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 5+ years of experience building high-performance software, ideally in infrastructure or platform engineering.
• Strong experience with Golang
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, networking (L4/L7, DNS, TLS/SSL, HTTP), and cloud-native architectures.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) and container orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Experience building APIs, standardizing APIs in large organizations, and creating API workflows.
• Experience designing and operating systems to deliver 99.99%+ uptime SLAs.
• Proven ability to debug complex systems from bit-and-bytes level (packets, protocols) to high-level design.
• Knowledge of observability and monitoring practices to ensure high availability and performance.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work across teams and geographies.
• Strong sense of ownership, with experience driving features end-to-end and influencing technical direction.
  
  

Bonus Points

• Experience working with or contributing to L4/L7 proxies such as Nginx, Envoy, or HAProxy.
• Background in API management, API workflows, or developer platforms.
• Experience with multi-cloud networking.
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure or networking projects.
  
  

✨ If you don’t check every box, we’d still love to hear from you. We’re looking for engineers who are deep in some areas, curious in others, and excited by the journey of building category-defining infrastructure software.

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.