Senior Software Engineer

Kong
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

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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.

Kong’s API Management suite includes the Kong Enterprise Gateway, the Konnect SaaS platform and a variety of Managed Gateways in public clouds like AWS, Azure and GCP. This suite of products helps customers in different industries (like finance, banking, eCommerce, airlines, etc.) manage their API platforms and operations at scale. Our customers expect secure, reliable, high scale, low latency offerings from Kong whether running on-premise or in the public cloud.

About The Role

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will develop high-performance Go runtime, CLI engines and declarative state managers. You will architect the software that thousands of engineering teams use every day to interact with Kong's runtime — including deck (Kong’s state management & drift detection engine), the Kong Terraform Provider, official Go SDKs and automated spec-driven API tooling.

What You Will Build & Own

You will balance Software Development with APIOps Architecture:

What You’ll Bring:

  • Declarative Engine
  • State & Drift Management Engines: Design and optimize algorithms in Go for state diffing, validation, and real-time drift detection across large-scale multi-tenant API topologies.
  • Go SDK & Core Libraries: Architect and maintain enterprise-grade, high-performance Go SDKs used by Kong’s internal microservices and external clients to interface with the Konnect SaaS platform.
  • API Design & Standardization: Define clean, extensible REST API contracts across Kong’s platform runtimes.
  • Code Generation & Tooling Pipelines: Architect spec-driven tooling (OpenAPI/AsyncAPI) to dynamically generate SDKs, client libraries, and IaC definitions without manual developer toil.
  • APIOps & IaC Ecosystem
  • Core CLI Engineering: Build modern, fast, and intuitive CLI-first developer experiences designed for both human developer workflows and high-concurrency CI/CD automation pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins).
  • Terraform & Provider Ecosystem: Build and extend high-reliability Terraform Providers to enable seamless IaC operations.
  • Support for Next-Gen Runtimes: Bring new runtime capabilities into the declarative management ecosystem as native API primitives.
  • 5+ years of software engineering experience designing and delivering production-grade backend systems and developer tools using Golang.
  • API Design Mastery: Proven experience crafting intuitive, developer-friendly API schemas (REST, gRPC, OpenAPI), with a strong focus on backwards compatibility, versioning and developer experience (DX).
  • Hands-on IaC / Platform Understanding: Production exposure to Terraform provider development, Kubernetes operators or stateful CI/CD automation pipelines.
  • Engineering Rigor: Strong commitment to clean code, comprehensive automated testing (unit, integration, end-to-end), benchmarking and robust software architecture.
  • Communication & Technical Leadership: Ability to articulate complex technical decisions, mentor junior engineers and collaborate across global backend and platform teams.

Why Join Kong?

  • Build for Engineers: Your work is open-source adjacent and directly impacts millions of developers and Fortune 500 enterprises around the globe.
  • Solving Deep Technical Problems: Move beyond standard CRUD services to solve high-impact problems in declarative state sync, API governance and distributed connectivity.
  • High-Growth Pre-IPO Startup: Scale your career alongside a market-leading company driving the future of API management and AI connectivity.

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.

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Questions about this job

How do I apply for the Senior Software Engineer job at Kong?

Use the apply link on this page: you apply directly with Kong on LinkedIn. Before you do, score your resume against this job description on Fitboard. It shows which skills and keywords the job asks for that your resume doesn't show, so you can fix them first.

What skills does Kong want for this Senior Software Engineer role?

The job description asks for Golang, API Design Mastery, Terraform, Kubernetes and CI/CD. Make sure your resume shows the ones you have, in the words the job uses: applicant tracking systems look for them.

How can I get a job at Kong?

Apply to the Kong roles that match your experience, and tailor your resume to each job description: for this role that means showing Golang, API Design Mastery, Terraform. A resume that matches the job's own keywords is more likely to get past screening. Fitboard scores your resume against this exact job for free.

Is this Senior Software Engineer job remote or onsite?

This is based in Bengaluru, Karnataka.

Is it free to apply? Does Fitboard charge anything?

Applying is free: you apply directly with Kong, and this job page and its apply link cost nothing. Checking your resume against this job is free too, with 3 free scans when you sign in and no credit card needed.

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