Kong
Senior Staff Software Engineer - Agent Marketplace
San Francisco, California, United States · Staff+
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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.
Responsibilities
- 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.
Requirements
- 7+ years of experience engineering enterprise-grade production software with a proven capability to design, build, and support complex distributed systems from scratch.
Skills
- For more information, visit www.konghq.com http://www.konghq.com.
Company info
- 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 Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI.
This listing is sourced directly from Kong's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.