Software Engineer, AI Gateway
Role Overview
This mid-level Software Engineer role involves building and maintaining the Kong AI gateway, focusing on features like multi-LLM routing, semantic caching, and database support. You'll work on a distributed engineering team to troubleshoot bugs, optimize performance, and integrate with third-party platforms, impacting global AI innovation by enabling secure API management for AI and LLM applications.
Perks & Benefits
The job is fully remote, with expectations to collaborate effectively in a distributed team setting, likely across time zones. It offers opportunities for career growth through ownership of products and documentation, within a culture that values strong communication and innovation in cloud API technologies.
Full Job Description
Are you ready to power the World's connections?
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.
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
Hands on experience with Rust
Bonus Points:
Hands on experience with NGINX/OpenResty/Kong/LuaJIT.
Hands on experience with Envoy or Istio.
#LI-BR2
About Kong:
Kong Inc., a leading developer of cloud API technologies, is on a mission to enable companies around the world to become “API-first” and securely accelerate AI adoption. Kong helps organizations globally — from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises — unleash developer productivity, build securely, and accelerate time to market. For more information about Kong, please visit www.konghq.com or follow us on X @thekonginc.
Similar jobs
Found 6 similar jobs
