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: On the Konnect Metering & Billing team at Kong, you’ll design, build, and maintain the backend services behind two products: usage metering and billing, and AI Cost Management (Tokenomics), which gives customers visibility and control over what their AI usage costs. As a Backend Engineer, you’ll work closely with Engineering and Product to build scalable services and APIs that process millions of events per second and have a direct, measurable impact on our customers. What you’ll do: • Design, implement, and maintain microservices and APIs for usage metering, billing, invoicing, and analytics at scale. • Build AI Cost Management capabilities that help customers track, attribute, and control LLM token usage and spend, including cost attribution, budgets, and usage limits. • Architect backend systems that process millions of events per second in real time. • Work with Product and Engineering to define system requirements and ship high-quality, customer-focused solutions. • Optimize database performance and ensure data integrity, reliability, and security across distributed systems. • Integrate with third-party services (e.g., Stripe, CRMs) to support billing and reporting needs. • Support production services through monitoring, troubleshooting, and on-call rotation to keep them highly available. • Apply best practices for DevOps, CI/CD, and cloud-native development. • Write automated tests to validate system behavior and prevent regressions. • And any additional tasks required by your manager. What you’ll bring: • Experience with Go, Node.js. • Contributions to open source projects. • Familiarity with cloud-native technologies (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker). • Exposure to big data systems (e.g., ClickHouse), streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka), and event-driven architectures. • 5+ years of professional software development experience. • Proven experience building scalable backend services. • Demonstrated ability to deliver and maintain production systems at scale. • Solid understanding of distributed systems, APIs, and database optimization. • Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Bonus points: • Familiarity with LLM APIs, token-based pricing, or AI gateway and observability tooling. • Experience working on developer-focused products. • Experience working on developer-focused products. 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.