Kong

Software Engineer, AI Gateway

Kong · Milan, Italy
Milan, Italy $63K–$78K Posted 2026-10-23
Salary
$63K–$78K
Type
Full-time
Experience
3+ 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:

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 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 Do:

  • Responsible for building and maintaining API management software for AI and LLMs and its underlying stack.
  • 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.
  • Any additional tasks required by manager.

What You'll Bring:

  • 3+ years of programming in server-side applications and components.
  • Hands on experience with either Golang or Rust
  • Experience 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.

#LI-EA1

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.

LLMRustGo
$110K — 10th pctl $270K — 90th pctl
This role’s midpoint $71K vs. market median $180K for Engineering roles
-60%
below median
Based on 10,000+ Engineering roles with disclosed salary ranges tracked on NewJob.
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