Senior Staff Software Engineer

Senior Staff Software Engineer at kong. About the role Senior Staff Software Engineer at kong. The posting lists San Francisco, California, United States. On the team you would What You’ll Do:. 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. Key facts Location: San Francisco, California, United States Engagement: full_time What you'll do

• You will What You’ll Do:.
• 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.
• Mentor engineers across the organization, multiplying the team's output by translating ambiguous product bets into highly defined, modular, and shippable technical milestones.
• Own the technical lifecycle completely by writing crystal-clear engineering documentation and product specifications for every system you architect.
• You will What You’ll Bring:.
• + 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.
• Deep operational familiarity with multi-tenant architectures, usage-based metering pipelines, billing integration patterns, or secure data exchange layers.
• Strong written communication and technical articulation skills, with an unwavering comfort operating within remote, globally distributed engineering environments (West Coast/Bay Area alignment preferred).

Requirements

• Own the technical lifecycle completely by writing crystal-clear engineering documentation and product specifications for every system you architect.
• You need What You’ll Bring:.
• + 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.
• Deep operational familiarity with multi-tenant architectures, usage-based metering pipelines, billing integration patterns, or secure data exchange layers.
• Strong written communication and technical articulation skills, with an unwavering comfort operating within remote, globally distributed engineering environments (West Coast/Bay Area alignment preferred).
• You need About Kong:.

Skills & tools You will use kubernetes. You will use go. You will use rust. Practical notes Note: About the company

• Have worked with our Account Executive team on your first opportunity Have shadowed a ton of calls and practiced several role plays Started delivering your ramp quota By the end of month 3, you will: Know our sales funnel inside and out, and feel confident to add value to our sales org Show clear delivery of our sales methodologies Provide insights to both our Account Development and marketing organizations to help us to continue to iterate and improve Delivered against your ramp q