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: 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 Do: • 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. • 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, 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. #LI-EA1 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.