Kong

Software Engineer AI Gateway

Milan, Italy

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hirly's read of this role

Role family: Engineering
Seniority: Mid level
Stated salary: €63,750 – €78,750 per year
Country: IT
Work mode: On-site / unstated
First seen by hirly: 1 Sept 2026

Derived automatically from the posting. Upload your resume above to see how the role scores against it.

the posting

Are you ready to unlock intelligence?

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.

About the Role:

You will join the engineering team that builds the Kong AI gateway, empowering companies and developers around the world to govern every step of their AI & LLM based innovation.

As a Software Engineer in the AI Gateway Team, you will be working on core features such as multi-LLM routing and balancing, semantic caching and routing, MCP, and more.

What You'll Do:

Responsible for building and maintaining API management software for AI and LLMs and its underlying stack.

Implement new innovative features including proxying capabilities, load balancing, databases support that extend Kong AI Gateway’s offering.

Bugs troubleshooting, performance tuning and low-level optimizations.

Fill the gaps between Kong and third-party deployment platforms and tooling.

Any additional tasks required by manager.

What You'll Bring:

3+ years of programming in server-side applications and components.

Hands on experience with either Golang or Rust

Experience building and debugging applications that are highly scalable, distributed, reliable and resilient.

Solid hands-on low-level technical expertise in Linux systems troubleshooting, and profiling.

Experience in distributed systems, Linux networking stack and computer systems programming, Kong works with APIs on both L7 and L4 transports and protocols, so this expertise and knowledge are required.

Comfortable working with a remotely distributed team.

Strong sense of ownership and excellent verbal and written communication skills -- engineers at Kong write the documentation for their products

Familiarity with AI LLM concepts and applications development

Bonus Points:

Hands on experience with NGINX/OpenResty/Kong/LuaJIT.

Hands on experience with Envoy or Istio.

#LI-EA1

About Kong:

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong’s unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit www.konghq.com .

Original posting on Kong's site ↗

Listed on hirly, a job board. hirly is not the employer: Kong is hiring for this role.

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