Founding Senior Software Engineer: M2M Commerce Platform

Kong; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong Inc. invites a senior software architect to join as a founding member of a zero-to-one engineering squad in San Francisco.

You will architect and build the coordination fabric for agent-to-API and agent-to-agent transactions—spanning discovery, identity, billing, and settlement—built on Kong’s runtime stack. You will own end-to-end full-stack surfaces, create the agent-native UX, scale the transaction infrastructure, mentor engineers, and drive architectural reviews.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience engineering enterprise-grade distributed software.
• Master-level backend and API infrastructure experience.
• Strong ability to collaborate across globally distributed teams.

Responsibilities

• Architect and own end-to-end full-stack surfaces of the marketplace loop, delivering high-performance tools and REST API substrate.
• Design agent-native UX, MCP server capabilities, sandbox tests, and CLI/SDK generation workflows.
• Scale and protect the transaction infrastructure with identity verification, usage metering, and multi-party settlement pipelines.
• Drive cross-functional execution across Kong's engineering ecosystem to integrate marketplace features.
• Lead architectural design reviews and promote a zero-technical-debt culture to prevent scaling bottlenecks.
• Mentor engineers and translate product bets into defined milestones and shipable work.
• Own the lifecycle by writing clear engineering docs and product specifications for every system.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend architecture

Golang

Kubernetes

Cloud-native patterns

Remote collaboration

Tools

Kubernetes

CLI/SDK tooling

Job description

Kong Inc. invites a senior software architect to join as a founding member of a zero-to-one engineering squad in San Francisco.

You will architect and build the coordination fabric for agent-to-API and agent-to-agent transactions—spanning discovery, identity, billing, and settlement—built on Kong’s runtime stack. You will own end-to-end full-stack surfaces, create the agent-native UX, scale the transaction infrastructure, mentor engineers, and drive architectural reviews.