Software Engineer 2, AI Gateway

KONG; Lombardia; On-site; EUR 55,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong Inc. is seeking a Software Engineer for the AI Gateway team in a role focused on building API management software for AI and LLMs. You will work on multi-LLM routing, semantic caching, and performance optimizations in a distributed system environment.

Your work will bridge Kong with deployment platforms, requiring strong Linux skills and hands-on experience with Go or Rust. Remote-friendly collaboration is encouraged.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of server-side programming experience.
• Hands-on with Golang or Rust in scalable, distributed systems.
• Strong Linux troubleshooting and profiling skills.
• Experience building and debugging API-centric software.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain API management software for AI and LLMs.
• Implement features like proxying, load balancing, and DB support.
• Troubleshoot, optimize performance, and harden low-level code.
• Collaborate with distributed teams and document work.

Skills

Golang

Rust

Distributed systems

Linux troubleshooting

APIs development

Tools

NGINX

OpenResty

LuaJIT

Envoy

Job description

Are you ready to unlock intelligence?

About the Role:

You will join the engineering team that builds the Kong AI gateway, empowering companies and developers around the world to govern every step of their AI & LLM based innovation.

As a Software Engineer in the AI Gateway Team, you will be working on core features such as multi-LLM routing and balancing, semantic caching and routing, MCP, and more.

What You'll Do:

• Responsible for building and maintaining API management software for AI and LLMs and its underlying stack.
• Implement new innovative features including proxying capabilities, load balancing, databases support that extend Kong AI Gateway’s offering.
• Bugs troubleshooting, performance tuning and low-level optimizations.
• Fill the gaps between Kong and third-party deployment platforms and tooling.
• Any additional tasks required by manager.

What You'll Bring:

• 3+ years of programming in server-side applications and components.
• Hands on experience with either Golang or Rust
• Experience building and debugging applications that are highly scalable, distributed, reliable and resilient.
• Solid hands-on low-level technical expertise in Linux systems troubleshooting, and profiling.
• Experience in distributed systems, Linux networking stack and computer systems programming, Kong works with APIs on both L7 and L4 transports and protocols, so this expertise and knowledge are required.
• Comfortable working with a remotely distributed team.
• Strong sense of ownership and excellent verbal and written communication skills -- engineers at Kong write the documentation for their products
• Familiarity with AI LLM concepts and applications development

Bonus Points:

• Hands on experience with NGINX/OpenResty/Kong/LuaJIT.
• Hands on experience with Envoy or Istio.

About Kong:

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong’s unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.