Senior Software Engineer, Kong

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend services and distributed systems
• Strong proficiency in Golang with experience building production services at scale
• Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts including consistency, availability, partitioning, and consensus
• Experience designing and implementing search infrastructure using technologies like Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, or similar
• Experience building event-driven architectures and notification systems
• Strong knowledge of database systems (SQL and NoSQL) and data modeling
• Experience with API design and development (REST, gRPC)
• Solid understanding of microservices architecture and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience with message queues and event streaming platforms (Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, or similar)
• Strong computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and system design
• Experience with Continuous Integration/Delivery concepts and tools, such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins
• Demonstrated skills using code repositories and collaboration tools (GitHub, JIRA, Confluence, or similar)
• Experience working with globally distributed teams
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to debug complex distributed systems issues

Desirable

• 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
• The Platform Team is the backbone of Kong's infrastructure, building and maintaining the critical services that power the entire Kong ecosystem
• Our team owns authentication, authorization, search, notifications, audit logging, and other foundational services that ensure Kong's products are secure, scalable, and reliable
• These services process millions of requests daily and are trusted by some of the world's most innovative companies
• The Senior Software Engineer will be a key contributor to the Platform Team, focusing on building and maintaining our search infrastructure, notification systems, and audit logging services
• You'll design and implement scalable, high-performance backend services that handle millions of events and queries daily
• Additionally, you'll work on developing Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools that extend and enhance Kong's platform capabilities
• This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems, Golang, and building resilient backend services that operate at scale
• Design, develop, and maintain search infrastructure and query systems that power Kong's product discovery and analytics capabilities
• Build and optimize notification services that deliver real-time alerts and updates across Kong's platform
• Develop and enhance audit logging systems that capture, store, and query critical security and compliance data
• Create MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools and integrations that extend platform functionality and enable new workflows
• Architect and implement scalable, distributed backend services using Golang and modern cloud-native technologies
• Collaborate with product managers, designers, and other engineers to define requirements and deliver high-quality features
• Write clean, maintainable, well-tested code with comprehensive unit, integration, and end-to-end tests
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and technical planning sessions
• Optimize service performance, reliability, and scalability through profiling, monitoring, and iterative improvements
• Contribute to the platform team's technical roadmap and help define architecture and best practices
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to a culture of engineering excellence
• Participate in on-call rotation to ensure high availability of platform services