Senior Staff Software Engineer (Agent Marketplace)

• Architect the future of machine-to-machine commerce as a founding member of a zero-to-one engineering squad. You will design, build, and scale the coordination fabric for agent-to-API and agent-to-agent transactions—spanning discovery, identity, billing, and settlement—built directly on top of Kong’s world-class runtime stack
• 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
• 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

Benefits

• Flexible time off: Take time to take care of yourself and the things that matter most
• Stock options: We want you to share in our success. That’s why stock options are offered to most Kongers
• U-First Fridays: Get 4 hours a month for continuous learning with a book, podcast, or course of your choice
• Virtual events: Stay connected with Donut chats, trivia, fitness challenges, guided meditations, and more
• Home office stipend: Build a home office environment tailored to support your productivity
• Dedicated unplug days: Silence those notifications. Enjoy some well-deserved long weekend where the entire team unplugs

• 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