Senior Staff Software Engineer (Agent Marketplace)

Join Kong, a leading company in the API management space, as a Senior Staff Software Engineer. In this role, you will be a founding member of a zero-to-one engineering squad, responsible for architecting the future of machine-to-machine commerce. You will design, build, and scale the coordination fabric for agent-to-API and agent-to-agent transactions, and drive cross-functional execution across Kong's engineering ecosystem. This is a unique opportunity to work in an autonomous startup unit within Kong, with the potential for significant impact and growth.

Architect the future of machine-to-machine commerce by designing, building, and scaling the coordination fabric for agent-to-API and agent-to-agent transactions.

Responsibilities

• Lead architectural design reviews and champion a zero-technical-debt culture while proactively preventing scaling bottlenecks across distributed backend components.
• Mentor engineers across the organization, multiplying the team's output by translating ambiguous product bets into highly defined, modular, and shippable technical milestones.

Requirements

• 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
• 7+ years of experience engineering enterprise-grade production software with a proven capability to design, build, and support complex distributed systems from scratch
• Master-level expertise with a modern backend stack (such as Golang or similar systems languages) alongside deep architectural command of API infrastructure, Kubernetes, and cloud-native patterns
• Extensive hands-on experience developing autonomous agent applications, tool-calling systems, prompt loops, or systems designed explicitly for machine consumption
• Strong written communication and technical articulation skills, with an unwavering comfort operating within remote, globally distributed engineering environments (West Coast/Bay Area alignment preferred)
• Deep operational familiarity with multi-tenant architectures, usage-based metering pipelines, billing integration patterns, or secure data exchange layers

Pay

USD 220,000 - 270,000