Kong

Senior Staff Software Engineer - Agent Marketplace

San Francisco, California, United States · Staff+

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 14 days ago

GoDistributed SystemsFull-Stack DevelopmentKubernetesRESTLeadershipCommunication

About the role

Architect the future of machine-to-machine commerce as a founding member of a zero-to-one engineering squad.
Operating as an autonomous startup unit inside Kong, this team is responsible for lowering organizational drag, unlocking engineering velocity, and establishing Kong's absolute leadership in the Agentic Era.
Mentor engineers across the organization, multiplying the team's output by translating ambiguous product bets into highly defined, modular, and shippable technical milestones.

Architect and own the end-to-end full-stack surfaces of the marketplace loop, delivering high-performance tools, the underlying REST API substrate, and developer-facing onboarding systems.
Design the foundational agent-native user experience, creating robust Model Context Protocol (MCP) server capabilities, sandboxed test environments, and elegant CLI/SDK generation workflows.
Scale and protect the transaction infrastructure by building high-reliability pipelines for programmatic identity verification, usage attribution, granular metering, and complex multi-party settlement.
Drive cross-functional execution across Kong's engineering ecosystem, partnering with gateway runtime, security plugins, and global core teams to smoothly integrate marketplace features.
Lead architectural design reviews and champion a zero-technical-debt culture while proactively preventing scaling bottlenecks across distributed backend components.
Own the technical lifecycle completely by writing crystal-clear engineering documentation and product specifications for every system you architect.
Extensive hands-on experience developing autonomous agent applications, tool-calling systems, prompt loops, or systems designed explicitly for machine consumption.

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.
Deep operational familiarity with multi-tenant architectures, usage-based metering pipelines, billing integration patterns, or secure data exchange layers.

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.

This listing is sourced directly from Kong's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.