Software Engineer AI Gateway
Pubblicato il 26-09-2026 - Kong in Milano
Location
Milan, Italy
Employment Type
Tempo pieno
Location Type
Hybrid
Department
All Cost CenterR&DENG; 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.
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.