Senior Software Engineer, Control Planes

Are you ready to unlock intelligence?

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.

The Mission:

At Kong, we are pioneering the Agentic Era of service connectivity by building the infrastructure that powers the modern API world. As a Software Engineer on the Konnect Control Plane team, you will architect the next-generation cloud-hosted control plane that manages global customer configurations seamlessly.

Your work will directly empower developers worldwide, ensuring high availability, speed, and seamless connectivity for Kong’s flagship service connectivity platform.

What You’ll Do:

• Architect and scale microservices that power Kong Konnect’s cloud-hosted control plane to manage global customer configurations seamlessly.
• Design, implement, and maintain highly performant, low-latency APIs and services that deliver exceptional Developer Delight.
• Drive solutions for technical problems of moderate complexity, keeping an active focus on preventing technical debt.
• Prevent regressions and guarantee product stability by writing robust, automated tests.
• Own the reliability and uptime of services in production by participating in an active on-call rotation.
• Collaborate closely with Product Management, Solutions Architects, and cross-functional engineering teams to implement impactful business features.

What You’ll Bring:

The Toolkit

• 5+ years of experience working in a team environment to develop, deliver, and maintain complex, distributed software solutions.
• Solid proficiency in Go (Golang) and designing relational database data models.
• Practical experience building, debugging, and maintaining microservices architectures at scale.
• Demonstrated experience performing DevOps monitoring, observability, and supporting a large-scale SaaS platform running on Kubernetes and containerized environments.
• Working knowledge of L4/L7 proxies such as Nginx, HA-proxy, or Envoy.
• Firm grasp of API lifecycle management, design standards, and testing frameworks (TDD/automated testing).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

The Kong DNA

• Ownership: You act as a driver, not a passenger, and take complete accountability for the quality of your systems and outcomes.
• Urgency: You thrive in a high-growth environment, iterating quickly and pushing for results with passion and grit.
• Collaboration: You break down silos, communicate transparently, and model the true spirit of a team player.

Bonus Points:

• Deep experience with Go standards and writing idiomatic, highly optimized Go.
• Direct experience with Nginx, OpenResty, LuaJIT, or the Kong gateway core.
• Experience with cloud-native observability stacks, specifically Datadog or OpenTelemetry.
• Active contributions to open-source software projects.

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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.