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Kong

Senior Software Engineer, AI Gateway - Shanghai

Shanghai, China
Level
Senior
Work type
On-site · Shanghai

Not stated in the posting: salary, visa.

Open. First seen 23 October 2026.

Apply on the company's site →

About the role

Are you ready to unlock intelligence?

Kong's standard text

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
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

74% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Kong's standard text, folded away below.

Compared with Kong's other open jobs.

The team: ENG HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 17 open in ENG. 9 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

Istio (12 of 17), Nginx (11 of 17), Envoy (10 of 17), Golang (9 of 17), Kubernetes (8 of 17), LLM (8 of 17), Rust (8 of 17)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

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

Other openings for this role

3 open postings for this role in Shanghai, China, first posted 23 October 2026. The company is likely hiring for more than one position. None has been taken down and posted again.

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