Software Engineer AI Gateway

Kong; Lombardia; Remote; EUR 55,000 - 85,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong is seeking a Software Engineer for the AI Gateway Team in a globally distributed environment. You will help build core features for multi-LLM routing, semantic caching, and more, ensuring scalable and reliable API management for AI/LLM workloads.

Join a team that values ownership, deep Linux performance work, and strong collaboration across remote colleagues. Experience with Kong technologies and distributed systems is a plus.

Qualifications

• At least 3+ years of experience in server-side programming.
• Proficiency with Golang or Rust and distributed systems.
• Strong Linux troubleshooting and profiling skills.
• Experience with APIs on L7 and L4 transports.
• Able to work in a remotely distributed team and own tasks.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain API management software for AI/LLMs and related stacks.
• Implement features including proxying, load balancing and DB support.
• Troubleshoot bugs, tune performance and perform low-level optimizations.
• Bridge Kong with third-party deployment platforms and tooling.
• Handle additional tasks as requested by the manager.

Skills

Golang

Rust

Distributed systems

Linux troubleshooting

Networking

Documentation

Communication

Tools

NGINX/OpenResty

Kong/LuaJIT

Envoy

Istio

Job description

Are you ready to unlock intelligence?

If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others.

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 be doing:

• 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.

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About Kong:

Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, Kong’s unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.