Senior Software Engineer

The role

You will develop high-performance Go runtime, CLI engines and declarative state managers. You will architect software used by engineering teams to interact with Kong's runtime.

What you will do

• Design and optimize algorithms in Go for state diffing, validation, and real-time drift detection
• Architect and maintain enterprise-grade, high-performance Go SDKs
• Define clean, extensible REST API contracts across Kong's platform runtimes
• Architect spec-driven tooling to dynamically generate SDKs, client libraries, and IaC definitions
• Build modern, fast, and intuitive CLI-first developer experiences
• Build and extend high-reliability Terraform Providers
• Bring new runtime capabilities into the declarative management ecosystem

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience designing and delivering production-grade backend systems and developer tools using Golang
• Proven experience crafting intuitive, developer-friendly API schemas (REST, gRPC, OpenAPI)
• Production exposure to Terraform provider development, Kubernetes operators or stateful CI/CD automation pipelines
• Strong commitment to clean code, comprehensive automated testing, benchmarking and robust software architecture
• Ability to articulate complex technical decisions, mentor junior engineers and collaborate across global backend and platform teams

Benefits

• Build for Engineers: Your work is open-source adjacent and directly impacts millions of developers and Fortune 500 enterprises
• Solving Deep Technical Problems: Move beyond standard CRUD services to solve high-impact problems
• High-Growth Pre-IPO Startup: Scale your career alongside a market-leading company

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.