Kong

Senior Software Engineer, API Gateway - Shanghai

Kong · Shanghai, China
Shanghai, China Posted 2026-10-23
Type
Full-time
Experience
5+ yr

Are you ready to unlock intelligence?

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:
Kong is an open-source project with a global adoption around the world. Developers and architects are adopting Kong in production among a large variety of use-cases, and actively help make Kong a better product with their feedback and contributions.

As a Systems Engineer in the Core Team, you will be working on core features such as proxying capabilities, load balancing, and database support with forward-thinking. You will be responsible for building foundations for other teams and customers, discovering and producing cutting edge industry trends and use-cases.
What You'll Do:

  • Responsible for designing, building and maintaining API management software and its underlying stack.
  • Architecture, design, and implement new innovative features including proxying capabilities, load balancing, databases support that extend Kong’s offering.
  • Bugs troubleshooting, performance tuning and low-level optimizations. Engage with open source community and extend Kong core to support the latest industry trends.
  • Fill the gaps between Kong and third-party deployment platforms and tooling.
  • And any additional tasks required by 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

Bonus Points:

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

About Kong:

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 http://www.konghq.com.

LLMRust
E
Senior Staff Software Engineer - Agent Marketplace
San Francisco, CA Hybrid
Engineering
$250K–$270K
E
Site Reliability Engineer 2
Washington, United States Remote
Engineering
$123K–$150K
O
Strategic Account Director – PSU/Government
Delhi, India Remote
Operations
$300K–$750K
See all 10+ roles at Kong →
D
Senior Software Engineer, AI Gateway
Docker San Francisco, CA Remote
Engineering
$160K–$260K
A
Senior Software Engineer, Inference
Anthropic Dublin, Ireland
Engineering
$235K–$295K
C
Senior / Staff Software Engineer, AI Platform
Clear Street Remote Remote
Engineering
$200K–$350K
C
Senior Systems Engineer, AI Gateway
Cloudflare In-Office
Engineering
$194K–$266K
See all Engineering roles →

Interested in this role?

Apply directly on the company site — no recruiter middleman, no account required.

Apply now →
Apply on company site