Senior Software Engineer, AI Gateway

Milan, Italy. Posted 19 days ago

The role

You will design, own, and lead the development of high-performance components for Kong's AI Gateway using Golang. You will influence technical roadmap and architecture to ensure scalable and resilient systems.

What you will do

Design, own, and lead the development of critical, high-performance components for Kong's AI Gateway using Golang.
Influence the technical roadmap and architecture.
Architect solutions that prevent technical debt and maintain 99.99% uptime and reliability.
Mentor and guide other engineers on the team.
Drive best practices in testing, observability, and continuous integration/delivery.
Collaborate cross-functionally with product management, SRE, and other engineering teams.
Resolve complex technical issues and conduct deep-dives into system performance.

Required qualifications

Extensive professional experience building software in a systems language like Golang or Python.
Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservice architectures, and API design principles.
Proven experience with cloud-native technologies, including Kubernetes and Docker.
Experience with or a strong interest in AI/ML infrastructure, such as LLM orchestration, vector databases, or model serving.
Solid knowledge of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, HTTP/2, gRPC).
Ownership: proactive problem-solver with a bias for action.
Urgency: thrive in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
Collaboration: excellent communicator who works effectively with a globally distributed team.

Nice to have

Contributions to open-source software projects.
Experience with Nginx, Lua, or service mesh technologies.
Familiarity with AI frameworks like LangChain, PyTorch, or TensorFlow.
Prior experience building API gateways, developer platforms, or large-scale infrastructure-as-a-service products.

About the company

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Their unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic.