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Kong

Software Engineer AI Gateway

Milan, Italy
Salary
€63,750 - €78,750
Level
Mid
Work type
Hybrid · Milan

Not stated in the posting: visa.

Open. First seen 2 October 2026.

About the role

Kong's standard text

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

Kong's standard text

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.

What this role asks for

Particular to this role

Envoy · Rust

Rare in Kong's other 37 open postings.

69% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Kong's standard text, folded away below.

Read against Kong's other open postings on this site.

The team: ENG HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 11 open in ENG. 4 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in March: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.

WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS

Golang (8 of 11), Kubernetes (7 of 11), AWS (6 of 11), Azure (6 of 11), GCP (6 of 11), Istio (6 of 11), Envoy (5 of 11)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

From the team and dates on Kong's own job board.

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