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. 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 Systems Engineer in the Core 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 Do: • Responsible for designing, building and maintaining API management software and its underlying stack. • Architecture, 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 open source community and extend Kong core to support the latest industry trends. • Fill the gaps between Kong and third-party deployment platforms and tooling. • And any additional tasks required by manager. What You'll Bring: • 8+ years of programming in server-side applications and components. • Experience 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 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.