Senior Software Engineer, AI Gateway - Milan

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.

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.

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  Responsible for designing, building and maintaining API management software for AI and LLMs and its underlying stack.

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  Architecture, design, and implement new innovative features including proxying capabilities, load balancing, databases support that extend Kong AI Gateway’s offering.

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  Bugs troubleshooting, performance tuning and low-level optimizations.

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  Fill the gaps between Kong and third-party deployment platforms and tooling.

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  Mentor junior members of the team.

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  Any additional tasks required by the manager.

• 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

• Hands on experience with NGINX/OpenResty/Kong/LuaJIT.

• Hands on experience with Envoy or Istio.

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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.