Senior Software Engineer, Control Plane

The Mission

The Control Plane team architects the central nervous system of Kong's entire ecosystem. We build the high-performance, resilient, and scalable services that enable our users to configure and manage billions of API calls with confidence. This role is at the heart of delivering a world-class developer experience, ensuring our platform is not just powerful, but also intuitive and reliable at enterprise scale.

What You’ll Do

• Design and implement core features for the Kong Gateway Control Plane, primarily using Golang.
• Own the full lifecycle of services, from architectural design and implementation to deployment and operational excellence.
• Lead technical discussions and architectural decisions to prevent technical debt and ensure our commitment to 99.99% uptime.
• Influence the technical roadmap for our cloud-native components, advocating for best practices in a distributed systems environment.
• Mentor other engineers through thoughtful code reviews and design sessions, fostering a culture of high-quality code and developer delight.
• Collaborate with product managers and other engineering teams to architect and deliver impactful solutions for our global user base.
• Resolve complex bugs and performance bottlenecks in our core networking and configuration management components.

What You’ll Bring

The Toolkit

• Significant professional experience writing and deploying production services in Golang.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, and API design principles.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes (K8s) and the cloud-native ecosystem.
• Proficiency with relational databases, such as PostgreSQL.
• Familiarity with modern CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices.

The Kong DNA

• Ownership: A proactive, self-starting mindset with a bias for action and a sense of responsibility for the end-to-end user experience.
• Urgency: The ability to thrive in a fast-paced, pre-IPO environment, delivering high-impact work on ambitious timelines without sacrificing quality.
• Collaboration: Excellent communication skills and a team-first attitude, adept at working across functions to achieve common goals.

Bonus Points

• Experience with API gateways, service mesh (like Kuma), or related networking technologies.
• Active contributions to open-source projects.
• Knowledge of Lua or NGINX internals.
• Experience building and managing large-scale SaaS platforms.

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