Software Engineer Intern - AI Gateway
Role Overview
This is a Software Engineer Intern role on the AI Gateway Team at Kong Inc., focusing on building and maintaining core features like proxying, load balancing, and database support for Kong AI Gateway. Day-to-day tasks include designing innovative features, troubleshooting bugs, optimizing performance, and engaging with the open-source community to extend the platform. The intern will work on foundational systems that impact other teams and customers, contributing to cutting-edge industry trends in a remote, distributed environment.
Perks & Benefits
The role is fully remote, with an expectation to work comfortably in a distributed team setting, likely across various time zones. It offers hands-on experience in a forward-thinking, open-source environment, with opportunities for career growth through community engagement and ownership of projects. The culture emphasizes strong communication, documentation, and innovation, typical of tech startups, though specific benefits like flexible hours or mentorship are implied but not explicitly stated.
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:
Kong is an open-source project with a global adoption around the world. Developers and architects are adopting Kong in production among a large variety of use-cases, and actively help make Kong a better product with their feedback and contributions.
As a Software Engineer Intern in the AI Gateway Team, you will be working on core features such as proxying capabilities, load balancing, and database support with forward-thinking. You will be responsible for building foundations for other teams and customers, discovering and producing cutting edge industry trends and use-cases.
What you'll be doing:
Responsible for designing, building and maintaining Kong AI Gateway software and its underlying stack.
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 the open source community and extend Kong AI Gateway to support the latest industry trends.
Fill the gaps between Kong and third-party deployment platforms and tooling.
And any additional tasks required by the manager.
What you'll bring:
Programming experience in server-side applications and components.
Experience in 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
Bonus Points:
Hands-on experience with NGINX/OpenResty/Kong/LuaJIT.
Hands-on experience with Envoy or Istio.
Hands on experience with Rust
#LI-WL1
About Kong:
Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.
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