Senior Systems Engineer: Core API & AI Platform

Kong; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong Inc. seeks a Systems Engineer to join the Core Team in the United States. You will design, build, and maintain API management software and its stack, advancing proxying, load balancing, and database support for a broad set of production use-cases.

You will work with highly scalable distributed systems, troubleshoot low-level Linux issues, engage with the open-source community, and contribute to Kong’s core with new features while collaborating across remote teams and documentation efforts.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of programming in server-side applications and components.
• Experience designing, prototyping, 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

Responsibilities

• Responsible for designing, building and maintaining API management software and its underlying stack.
• Architecture, design, and implement new innovative features including proxying capabilities, load balancing, databases support that extend Kong’s offering.
• Bugs troubleshooting, performance tuning and low-level optimizations. Engage with open source community and extend Kong core to support the latest industry trends.
• Fill the gaps between Kong and third-party deployment platforms and tooling.
• And any additional tasks required by manager.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

Linux troubleshooting

APIs & transports

Remote collaboration

Technical writing

AI/LLM concepts

Tools

LuaJIT

OpenResty

NGINX

Kong

Job description

Kong Inc. seeks a Systems Engineer to join the Core Team in the United States. You will design, build, and maintain API management software and its stack, advancing proxying, load balancing, and database support for a broad set of production use-cases.

You will work with highly scalable distributed systems, troubleshoot low-level Linux issues, engage with the open-source community, and contribute to Kong’s core with new features while collaborating across remote teams and documentation efforts.