Staff Architect: AI Marketplace & Distributed Systems

Speedrun Talent Network; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 190,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong Inc. seeks a senior architect to join as a founding member of a zero-to-one engineering squad. You will architect and build a high-performance marketplace coordination fabric for agent-to-API and agent-to-agent transactions on Kong's runtime stack.

You will mentor engineers, own the full lifecycle, and collaborate across global teams to ensure scalable, secure, and reliable systems. Remote-friendly with West Coast alignment preferred.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of production software engineering experience.
• Proven ability to design, build, and support complex distributed systems.
• Backend stack and API infrastructure expertise; Kubernetes and cloud-native patterns.

Responsibilities

• Architect end-to-end full-stack surfaces of the marketplace loop and REST API substrate.
• Design the agent-native UX, MCP server capabilities, and CLI/SDK workflows.
• Scale transaction infrastructure with high-reliability identity, metering, and settlement pipelines.
• Collaborate with gateway runtime, security plugins, and global core teams to integrate features.
• Lead architectural reviews and promote zero-technical-debt culture; prevent bottlenecks.
• Mentor engineers and translate bets into defined milestones.
• Own the technical lifecycle with clear engineering docs and specs.

Skills

Golang

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Cloud-native

Multi-tenant

Billing integration

Agent apps

Documentation

Tools

Kong

REST API

DevOps tooling

Job description

Kong Inc. seeks a senior architect to join as a founding member of a zero-to-one engineering squad. You will architect and build a high-performance marketplace coordination fabric for agent-to-API and agent-to-agent transactions on Kong's runtime stack.

You will mentor engineers, own the full lifecycle, and collaborate across global teams to ensure scalable, secure, and reliable systems. Remote-friendly with West Coast alignment preferred.