Senior Software Engineer, Control Plane

The role

The Control Plane team builds high-performance, resilient, and scalable services for the Kong ecosystem. You will design and implement core features for the Kong Gateway Control Plane using Golang.

What you will do

• Design and implement core features for the Kong Gateway Control Plane using Golang
• Own the full lifecycle of services from design to deployment
• Lead technical discussions and architectural decisions
• Influence the technical roadmap for cloud-native components
• Mentor other engineers through code reviews and design sessions
• Collaborate with product managers and engineering teams
• Resolve complex bugs and performance bottlenecks

Required qualifications

• Significant professional experience writing and deploying production services in Golang
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, and API design principles
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes (K8s) and the cloud-native ecosystem
• Proficiency with relational databases, such as PostgreSQL
• Familiarity with modern CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices
• Ownership: A proactive, self-starting mindset with a bias for action
• Urgency: Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, pre-IPO environment
• Collaboration: Excellent communication skills and a team-first attitude

Nice to have

• Experience with API gateways, service mesh (like Kuma), or related networking technologies
• Active contributions to open-source projects
• Knowledge of Lua or NGINX internals
• Experience building and managing large-scale SaaS platforms

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.