Senior Software Engineer

Are you ready to power the World's connections?

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 Platform Team is the backbone of Kong's infrastructure, building and maintaining the critical services that power the entire Kong ecosystem. Our team owns authentication, authorization, search, notifications, audit logging, and other foundational services that ensure Kong's products are secure, scalable, and reliable. These services process millions of requests daily and are trusted by some of the world's most innovative companies.

About the role:

The Senior Software Engineer will be a key contributor to the Platform Team, focusing on building and maintaining our search infrastructure, notification systems, and audit logging services. You'll design and implement scalable, high-performance backend services that handle millions of events and queries daily. Additionally, you'll work on developing Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools that extend and enhance Kong's AI platform capabilities. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems, Golang, and building resilient backend services that operate at scale.

What you'll do:

• Design, develop, and maintain search infrastructure and query systems that power Kong's product discovery and analytics capabilities.

• Build and optimize notification services that deliver real-time alerts and updates across Kong's platform.

• Develop and enhance audit logging systems that capture, store, and query critical security and compliance data.

• Create MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools and integrations that extend platform AI functionality and enable new AI workflows.

• Architect and implement scalable, distributed backend services using Golang and modern cloud-native technologies.

• Collaborate with product managers, designers, and other engineers to define requirements and deliver high-quality features.

• Write clean, maintainable, well-tested code with comprehensive unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.

• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and technical planning sessions.

• Optimize service performance, reliability, and scalability through profiling, monitoring, and iterative improvements.

• Contribute to the platform team's technical roadmap and help define architecture and best practices.

• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to a culture of engineering excellence.

• Participate in on-call rotation to ensure high availability of platform services.

What you'll bring:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend services and distributed systems.

• Strong proficiency in Golang with experience building production services at scale.

• Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts including consistency, availability, partitioning, and consensus.

• Experience designing and implementing search infrastructure using technologies like Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, or similar.

• Experience building event-driven architectures and notification systems.

• Strong knowledge of database systems (SQL and NoSQL) and data modeling.

• Experience with API design and development (REST, gRPC).

• Solid understanding of microservices architecture and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).

• Experience with message queues and event streaming platforms (Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, or similar).

• Strong computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and system design.

• Experience with Continuous Integration/Delivery concepts and tools, such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins.

• Demonstrated skills using code repositories and collaboration tools (GitHub, JIRA, Confluence, or similar).

• Experience working with globally distributed teams.

• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to debug complex distributed systems issues.

Bonus Points:

• Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar extensibility frameworks.

• Experience building compliance and audit logging systems for enterprise or regulated environments.

• Knowledge of observability and monitoring practices (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK stack).

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or Pulumi.

• Experience with Cloud Platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.

• Familiarity with authentication and authorization systems (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT).

• Experience with high-throughput, low-latency systems and performance optimization.

• Experience with rate limiting, throttling, and quota management systems.

• Knowledge of security best practices for backend services.

• Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd).

• Contributions to open-source projects or active involvement in the developer community.

• Background in SRE practices and building reliable, self-healing systems.

#LI-AP1

About Kong:

Kong Inc., a leading developer of cloud API technologies, is on a mission to enable companies around the world to become "API-first" and securely accelerate AI adoption. Kong helps organizations globally — from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises — unleash developer productivity, build securely, and accelerate time to market. For more information about Kong, please visit or follow us on X @thekonginc.