# Software Engineer 2, AI Gateway at Kong

Software Engineer 2, AI Gateway at Kong in Milan, Italy. Hybrid, full-time, paying €64k–€79k. Posted October 23, 2026.

- Company: Kong
- Location: Milan, Italy
- Workplace: Hybrid
- Job type: Full-time
- Pay: €64k–€79k
- Experience: 3+ years
- Posted: 2026-10-23
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kong/89265243-4f58-42bb-9488-9713c0eb108e/application
- Source: https://jobmagic.ai/jobs/software-engineer-2-ai-gateway-kong-dvgzxv

## Requirements

- 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

## Description

**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.