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.

- 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