Senior Software Engineer, AI Gateway – Milan

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.

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 Senior 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 be doing:

• Responsible for designing, building and maintaining API management software for AI and LLMs and its underlying stack.
• Architecture, design, and 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.
• Mentor junior members of the team.
• Any additional tasks required by the manager.

What you’ll bring:

• 5+ years of programming in server-side applications and components.
• Experience designing, prototyping, 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
  • Hands on experience with Rust

Bonus Points:

• Hands on experience with NGINX/OpenResty/Kong/LuaJIT.
• Hands on experience with Envoy or Istio.

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 www.konghq.com or follow us on X @thekonginc.

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