Staff Software Engineer (Backend/Observability)

Are you ready to power the World's connections?

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

Design, develop, and maintain microservices that power Kong Konnect, the Service Connectivity Platform. Working closely with Product Management and teams across Engineering, you will develop software that has a direct impact on our customers' business and Kong's success.

What you will do

• Architect and design highly available, scalable, and secure systems that solve complex business and technical challenges, primarily in the observability space
• Lead technical strategy and execution, ensuring alignment with product vision and long-term business goals.
• Drive innovation by evaluating new technologies, frameworks, and approaches to improve performance, reliability, and developer velocity.
• Design cloud systems that are resilient to regional and zonal outages.
• Participate in an on-call rotation to support services in production, ensuring high performance and reliability.
• Analyse and rectify recurring design issues, establishing best practices for early detection and prevention within the product team.
• Write and maintain automated tests to ensure code integrity and prevent regressions.
• Collaborate with technical leadership to establish team-wide best practices in microservice architecture, design, and development.
• Mentor team members and contribute to their growth.

• Deliver hands-on contributions in code, design reviews, and troubleshooting critical issues in production systems.

What you will bring

• 8+ years working in a team to develop, deliver, and maintain complex software solutions.
• Understanding of cloud-native systems like Kubernetes, GitOps, and Terraform.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Experience with streaming platforms such as Kafka, AWS Kinesis, Flink, Spark, etc.
• Strong background in systems such as large-scale storage, indexing/search, or observability platforms.
• Operational experience in running large-scale, high-performance internet services, including on-call responsibilities.
• Expertise with data modelling in NoSQL databases.
• Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Java, Go, C++, Python).
• Experience with AWS and cloud platforms for SaaS teams.

• Experience in designing, prototyping, building, monitoring, and debugging microservices architectures and distributed systems.

Bonus points

• Experience with storage and search of large datasets using data storage like Druid/Clickhouse/Pinot, Iceberg/Athena/Hive, OpenSearch/Elasticsearch or similar.
• Expertise in ingestion, indexing, and search at scale (minimum TBs/day).
• Led a team of engineers from an idea to a polished product
• Experience contributing to Open Source Software projects.
• Experience working or developing L4/L7 proxies such as Nginx, HA-proxy, Envoy, etc.

#LI-PC1

About Kong

Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.