Senior Software Engineer, API Gateway - Europe (Remote)

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-Core project. Its foundation is the Open-source API Gateway. On top of that there is an Enterprise Gateway, which extends and improves it. The Enterprise Gateway is the central piece of the Kong ecosystem, which includes other pieces of software and infrastructure that add even more value.

Your main responsibility will be developing, maintaining and extending the Kong Gateway, on both its Open-source and the Enterprise versions. You will engage with the Open Source community, and work closely with other teams in the company to improve it. You will be responsible for building foundations for other teams and customers, discovering and producing cutting edge industry trends and use-cases.

The job is fully remote for people in Europe. Kong can currently hire in Ireland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, France or the United Kingdom.

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What you'll be doing:

• Work with the Product management team to identify and implement enhancements.
• Propose and Implement POCs and prototypes for networking software in rust
• Work closely with engineering teams to architecture, design, and understand upcoming new features.
• Bug fixing, performance tuning and low-level optimizations.
• Engage with the open source community.
• Provide help to the support and escalation teams.
• Mentoring and pairing with other team members.
• And any additional tasks required by the manager

What you'll bring:

• Comfortable working in a remote distributed team, with minimal supervision.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, both as a means to work with others and to write documentation.
• Solid hands-on low-level technical expertise for Linux systems troubleshooting, and profiling.
• Experience programming low-level networking systems: Nginx and/or Openresty are preferred but others like Apache are also valid
• Experience in any of the following: IdP/AuthZ systems and integration, monitoring and profiling systems, network traffic inspection.
• Optional, but highly sought after: At least 2 years of experience working with Rust
• Experience designing, prototyping, building and debugging applications that are highly scalable, distributed, reliable and resilient.
• Familiarity with a scripting language. Lua would be the ideal, but Perl, Python, or Ruby also serve.
• You've spent time developing and supporting a large scale SaaS platform.
• You have at least 5-ish years working in a team to develop, package and deliver server-side applications and components.

Bonus Points:

• Experience with NGINX/OpenResty/Kong/LuaJIT.
• Experience with Envoy or Istio.
• Understanding of VM implementations like eBPF and/or WASM.

About Kong: 

Kong is THE cloud native API platform with the fastest, most adopted API gateway in the world (over 300m downloads!). As the innovation leader of cloud API technologies, Kong is on a mission to enable companies around the world to become "API-first" and securely accelerate AI adoption. Kong helps organizations globally - from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises - unleash developer productivity, build securely and accelerate to market.

83% of web traffic today is API calls! APIs are the connective tissue of the cloud and the underlying technology that allows software to talk and interact with one another. Therefore, we believe that APIs act as the nervous system of the cloud. Our audacious mission is to build the nervous system that will safely and reliably connect all of humankind!  

For more information about Kong, please visit konghq.com or follow @thekonginc on Twitter.

We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

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