Senior Software Engineer

Are you ready to unlock intelligence

If you dont think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job please apply. Nobody checks every box - were looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas and have some interest and capabilities in others.

Kongs API Management suite includes the Kong Enterprise Gateway the Konnect SaaS platform and a variety of Managed Gateways in public clouds like AWS Azure and GCP. This suite of products helps customers in different industries (like finance banking eCommerce airlines etc.) manage their API platforms and operations at scale. Our customers expect secure reliable high scale low latency offerings from Kong whether running on-premise or in the public cloud.

About the Role:

As a Senior Software Engineer you will develop high-performance Go runtime CLI engines and declarative state managers. You will architect the software that thousands of engineering teams use every day to interact with Kongs runtime including deck (Kongs state management & drift detection engine) the Kong Terraform Provider official Go SDKs and automated spec-driven API tooling.

What You Will Build & Own:

You will balance Software Development with APIOps Architecture:

1. Declarative Engine

• State & Drift Management Engines: Design and optimize algorithms in Go for state diffing validation and real-time drift detection across large-scale multi-tenant API topologies.

• Go SDK & Core Libraries: Architect and maintain enterprise-grade high-performance Go SDKs used by Kongs internal microservices and external clients to interface with the Konnect SaaS platform.

• API Design & Standardization: Define clean extensible REST API contracts across Kongs platform runtimes.

• Code Generation & Tooling Pipelines: Architect spec-driven tooling (OpenAPI/AsyncAPI) to dynamically generate SDKs client libraries and IaC definitions without manual developer toil.

2. APIOps & IaC Ecosystem

• Core CLI Engineering: Build modern fast and intuitive CLI-first developer experiences designed for both human developer workflows and high-concurrency CI/CD automation pipelines (GitHub Actions GitLab CI Jenkins).

• Terraform & Provider Ecosystem: Build and extend high-reliability Terraform Providers to enable seamless IaC operations.

• Support for Next-Gen Runtimes: Bring new runtime capabilities into the declarative management ecosystem as native API primitives.
  
  

  What Youll Bring:

• 5 years of software engineering experience designing and delivering production-grade backend systems and developer tools using Golang.

• API Design Mastery: Proven experience crafting intuitive developer-friendly API schemas (REST gRPC OpenAPI) with a strong focus on backwards compatibility versioning and developer experience (DX).

• Hands-on IaC / Platform Understanding: Production exposure to Terraform provider development Kubernetes operators or stateful CI/CD automation pipelines.

• Engineering Rigor: Strong commitment to clean code comprehensive automated testing (unit integration end-to-end) benchmarking and robust software architecture.

• Communication & Technical Leadership: Ability to articulate complex technical decisions mentor junior engineers and collaborate across global backend and platform teams.

Why Join Kong

• Build for Engineers: Your work is open-source adjacent and directly impacts millions of developers and Fortune 500 enterprises around the globe.

• Solving Deep Technical Problems: Move beyond standard CRUD services to solve high-impact problems in declarative state sync API governance and distributed connectivity.

• High-Growth Pre-IPO Startup: Scale your career alongside a market-leading company driving the future of API management and AI connectivity.

#LI-PC1

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 Kongs 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 .

Required Experience:

Senior IC