Senior Staff Software Engineer - Agent Marketplace

Kong; San Francisco (CA); In loco; USD 260.000 - 320.000; Tempo pieno

Descrizione del lavoro

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.

Competenze

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

Mansioni

• 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.

Conoscenze

Distributed systems

Backend architecture

Golang

Kubernetes

Cloud-native patterns

Remote collaboration

Strumenti

Kubernetes

CLI/SDK tooling

Descrizione del lavoro

Are you ready to unlock intelligence?

About The Role

Architect the future of machine-to-machine commerce as a founding member of a zero-to-one engineering squad. You will design, build, and scale the coordination fabric for agent-to-API and agent-to-agent transactions—spanning discovery, identity, billing, and settlement—built directly on top of Kong’s world-class runtime stack. Operating as an autonomous startup unit inside Kong, this team is responsible for lowering organizational drag, unlocking engineering velocity, and establishing Kong’s absolute leadership in the Agentic Era.

What You’ll Do

• Architect and own the end-to-end full-stack surfaces of the marketplace loop, delivering high-performance tools, the underlying REST API substrate, and developer-facing onboarding systems.
• Design the foundational agent-native user experience, creating robust Model Context Protocol (MCP) server capabilities, sandboxed test environments, and elegant CLI/SDK generation workflows.
• Scale and protect the transaction infrastructure by building high-reliability pipelines for programmatic identity verification, usage attribution, granular metering, and complex multi-party settlement.
• Drive cross-functional execution across Kong's engineering ecosystem, partnering with gateway runtime, security plugins, and global core teams to smoothly integrate marketplace features.
• Lead architectural design reviews and champion a zero-technical-debt culture while proactively preventing scaling bottlenecks across distributed backend components.
• Mentor engineers across the organization, multiplying the team's output by translating ambiguous product bets into highly defined, modular, and shippable technical milestones.
• Own the technical lifecycle completely by writing crystal-clear engineering documentation and product specifications for every system you architect.

What You’ll Bring

• 7+ years of experience engineering enterprise-grade production software with a proven capability to design, build, and support complex distributed systems from scratch.
• Master-level expertise with a modern backend stack (such as Golang or similar systems languages) alongside deep architectural command of API infrastructure, Kubernetes, and cloud-native patterns.
• Extensive hands-on experience developing autonomous agent applications, tool-calling systems, prompt loops, or systems designed explicitly for machine consumption.
• Deep operational familiarity with multi-tenant architectures, usage-based metering pipelines, billing integration patterns, or secure data exchange layers.
• Strong written communication and technical articulation skills, with an unwavering comfort operating within remote, globally distributed engineering environments (West Coast/Bay Area alignment preferred).

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.