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Kong is building the connectivity layer for AI, creating an AI Gateway platform that helps organizations govern and manage AI and LLM-based innovation across APIs and AI traffic. You will join the engineering team responsible for core features including multi-LLM routing and balancing, semantic caching and routing, MCP, and related capabilities.
In this role, you will be responsible for building and maintaining API management software for AI and LLMs and its underlying infrastructure stack. Your day-to-day work will include implementing innovative features such as proxying capabilities, load balancing, and database support that extend Kong AI Gateway's offering. You will also handle bug troubleshooting, performance tuning, and low-level optimizations. Additionally, you will work to fill gaps between Kong and third-party deployment platforms and tooling, ensuring seamless integration across the ecosystem.
Kong values ownership and communication—engineers at Kong write the documentation for their products, so you'll be expected to communicate clearly both verbally and in writing. You'll be working with a distributed remote team across multiple time zones.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 3+ years of programming experience in server-side applications and components
- Hands-on experience with either Golang or Rust
- 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)
- Comfortable working with a remotely distributed team
- Strong sense of ownership and excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Familiarity with AI LLM concepts and applications development
BONUS:
- Hands-on experience with NGINX, OpenResty, Kong, or LuaJIT
- Hands-on experience with Envoy or Istio
