Kong

Senior Software Engineer, AI Gateway - Shanghai

Shanghai, China. Posted 21 days ago

The role

You will engineer the core system powering live AI traffic. You will take ownership of the runtime and data plane responsible for routing, translating, securing, and analyzing requests.

What you will do

  • Design, build, and maintain Kong's AI Gateway runtime and its underlying data plane stack.
  • Architect, design, and implement new features including proxying, routing, load balancing, guardrails, compression, and identity.
  • Build and maintain security, performance, and compliance foundations.
  • Partner with technical support engineers to resolve customer-reported issues end to end.
  • Engage with the open source community and extend Kong core.
  • Fill the gaps between Kong AI Gateway and third-party AI/ML providers, deployment platforms, and tooling.
  • Perform additional tasks required by the manager.

Required qualifications

  • 6+ years of programming experience in server-side applications and components.
  • Experienced in designing, prototyping, building, and debugging highly scalable, distributed, reliable, and resilient applications.
  • Solid hands-on, low-level technical expertise in Linux systems troubleshooting and profiling.
  • Experienced in distributed systems, the Linux networking stack, and computer systems programming.
  • Solid design and coding practices.
  • Skilled at code review and mentoring junior engineers.
  • Comfortable working with remotely distributed teams.
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills across stakeholder groups.
  • Strong sense of ownership, self-driven and proactive.
  • Able to handle urgent issues under pressure while maintaining high quality.
  • Familiar with AI LLM concepts and application development.

Nice to have

  • Hands-on experience with NGINX/OpenResty/Kong/LuaJIT.
  • Hands-on experience with Envoy or Istio.
  • Hands-on experience with Rust.
  • Hands-on experience leveraging AI agents to deliver intricate software systems efficiently and with superior quality.

About the company

Kong Inc. is the AI Connectivity Company 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.