Senior Software Engineer, Control Plane

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 Control Plane team architects the central nervous system of Kong's entire ecosystem. We build the high-performance, resilient, and scalable services that enable our users to configure and manage billions of API calls with confidence. This role is at the heart of delivering a world-class developer experience, ensuring our platform is not just powerful, but also intuitive and reliable at enterprise scale.

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  Design and implement core features for the Kong Gateway Control Plane, primarily using Golang.

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  Own the full lifecycle of services, from architectural design and implementation to deployment and operational excellence.

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  Lead technical discussions and architectural decisions to prevent technical debt and ensure our commitment to 99.99% uptime.

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  Influence the technical roadmap for our cloud-native components, advocating for best practices in a distributed systems environment.

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  Mentor other engineers through thoughtful code reviews and design sessions, fostering a culture of high-quality code and developer delight.

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  Collaborate with product managers and other engineering teams to architect and deliver impactful solutions for our global user base.

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  Resolve complex bugs and performance bottlenecks in our core networking and configuration management components.

• Significant professional experience writing and deploying production services in Golang.

• Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, and API design principles.

• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes (K8s) and the cloud-native ecosystem.

• Proficiency with relational databases, such as PostgreSQL.

• Familiarity with modern CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices.

• Ownership: A proactive, self-starting mindset with a bias for action and a sense of responsibility for the end-to-end user experience.

• Urgency: The ability to thrive in a fast-paced, pre-IPO environment, delivering high-impact work on ambitious timelines without sacrificing quality.

• Collaboration: Excellent communication skills and a team-first attitude, adept at working across functions to achieve common goals.

• Experience with API gateways, service mesh (like Kuma), or related networking technologies.

• Active contributions to open-source projects.

• Knowledge of Lua or NGINX internals.

• Experience building and managing large-scale SaaS platforms.

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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.