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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

Cloud Gateways is Kong's foundational cloud-native SaaS platform powering its managed API and AI Gateway offerings. It provides a multi-tenant control plane, automation and platform services that enable customers to securely deploy, operate and scale dedicated gateway infrastructure with the simplicity of a fully managed cloud service.

Behind that experience is a distributed platform responsible for provisioning, fleet management, software lifecycle, zero-downtime upgrades, observability, security and multi-region operations across globally distributed cloud infrastructure. The platform powers mission-critical workloads with a target of 99.99% availability, balancing reliability, performance, operational excellence and infrastructure efficiency at global scale.

As enterprises increasingly adopt AI alongside traditional APIs, Cloud Gateways becomes an increasingly important part of Kong's API and AI strategy. Every improvement in automation, scalability and operational excellence accelerates the delivery of new platform capabilities and enables product teams to innovate faster.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll help define and build that platform.

The problems you'll solve span software engineering, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure and site reliability engineering, requiring a systems mindset and a passion for building platforms that are reliable, scalable and simple to operate.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role with end-to-end ownership of core platform capabilities. You'll shape technical strategy, influence platform architecture and solve complex engineering challenges while working across engineering organizations globally.

We're looking for engineers who think beyond individual services, treat platforms as products and embrace a system ownership mindset. You'll be equally comfortable diving deep into production issues, designing resilient distributed systems and influencing long-term platform architecture and engineering strategy.

Success in this role requires balancing software engineering, cloud infrastructure and operational excellence while always optimizing for the platform as a whole rather than individual services.

Why Join Cloud Gateways?

Cloud Gateways is more than a product. It's the foundational platform powering Kong's managed API and AI Gateway offerings, and the platform on which future managed connectivity services will be built.

It provides the common platform for provisioning, fleet management, software lifecycle, upgrades, observability, reliability and operational excellence. Every investment in Cloud Gateways enables product teams to deliver new capabilities faster while giving customers a consistent, secure and fully managed experience.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll help build the platform that sits at the center of Kong's API and AI strategy. Your work won't be confined to a single service or feature. You'll influence the underlying platform that multiple products depend on.

You'll work on engineering problems such as:

Building a distributed platform that powers Kong's managed API and AI Gateway offerings.

Operating globally distributed control plane services at enterprise scale.

Managing the lifecycle of thousands of dedicated gateway deployments across multiple cloud regions.

Designing zero-downtime provisioning, upgrades and fleet-wide orchestration.

Building self-healing systems through software, automation and intelligent operations.

Improving reliability, observability and operational excellence at scale.

Scaling the platform that enables the next generation of managed connectivity services.

If you enjoy building foundational platforms, thinking in systems, and solving problems that span software engineering, cloud infrastructure and distributed systems, you'll have the opportunity to shape the platform powering Kong's next generation of managed API and AI offerings.

What You'll Do

Own the Cloud Gateways Platform

Own the technical direction, architecture and evolution of Cloud Gateways, the foundational platform powering Kong's managed API and AI Gateway offerings. Design and evolve highly available cloud-native infrastructure across Kubernetes and public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure and GCP), building a scalable, resilient, secure and operationally efficient platform for globally distributed gateway infrastructure.

Drive Reliability & Operational Excellence

Own the availability, reliability, performance and operational health of the Cloud Gateways platform. Define and drive SLIs, SLOs and error budgets while ensuring the platform consistently meets its 99.99% availability objectives. Continuously improve observability, scalability, capacity, infrastructure efficiency and platform resilience through software engineering, automation, incident management and operational excellence.

Automate & Optimize Platform Operations

Build platform capabilities that automate provisioning provisioning, lifecycle management, fleet-wide upgrades, configuration management and infrastructure orchestration. Continuously improve platform performance, infrastructure utilization and cloud efficiency while balancing reliability, scalability, security and customer experience.

Lead Through Technical Influence

Influence technical strategy and architectural direction across engineering organizations. Build alignment with engineering leadership, lead cross-functional initiatives and mentor engineers through architecture reviews, technical guidance and engineering best practices to raise the engineering bar across the Managed Gateways organization.

What You'll Bring

Software & Platform Engineering

Experience building or operating large-scale multi-tenant SaaS platforms. Experience running infrastructure or platform services ("X-as-a-Service") at scale is strongly preferred.

Significant experience designing, building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.

Experience at Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer or equivalent technical leadership level.

Strong software engineering skills with production experience in Golang.

Deep expertise in Kubernetes and at least one major public cloud provider (AWS, Azure or GCP), including compute, networking, storage and cloud-native infrastructure services.

Strong understanding of networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, load balancing, reverse proxies, ingress controllers and service mesh technologies.

Curiosity and ability to dive deep into systems, understand infrastructure internals and solve complex problems across the software and cloud stack.

Reliability & Operational Excellence

Strong understanding of Site Reliability Engineering principles, including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, incident management, capacity planning and operational excellence.

Experience owning business-critical production platforms with stringent availability and reliability objectives.

Proven experience leading production incidents, driving blameless postmortems and continuously improving operational maturity through automation.

Strong observability experience using metrics, logging, tracing and monitoring platforms such as Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana or OpenTelemetry.

Passion for building software that eliminates operational toil while improving reliability, scalability and operational efficiency.

Technical Leadership & Cross-Organizational Influence

Demonstrated ability to operate effectively across multiple levels of abstraction, from debugging low-level production issues and optimizing cloud infrastructure to defining long-term platform architecture and engineering strategy.

Strong system ownership mindset with the ability to balance customer experience, platform reliability, engineering productivity, infrastructure efficiency and long-term platform evolution.

Proven ability to influence technical direction across multiple engineering organizations through strong communication, collaboration and technical leadership.

Comfortable navigating ambiguity, simplifying complex systems and making pragmatic engineering decisions that create long-term platform leverage.

Nice to Have

Experience with API gateways, AI gateways, reverse proxies, edge networking or service mesh technologies.

Experience designing distributed control planes, fleet management systems or cloud infrastructure platforms.

Experience operating large Kubernetes fleets across multiple regions.

Familiarity with security, compliance and multi-tenant cloud architectures.

About Kong

Kong Inc. is a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises and innovative startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to securely connect, govern, accelerate and monetize APIs and AI services across any environment.

At Kong, you'll work alongside world-class engineers solving some of the industry's most challenging distributed systems and cloud infrastructure problems. Your work will directly influence the platform powering the next generation of API and AI connectivity used by thousands of organizations worldwide.

About Kong:

Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.