Software Engineer 2, Managed Gateways

About the Role:

As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll not only build critical components of the Managed Gateways platform, but also take ownership of major features end-to-end, lead technical execution within the team, and mentor peers. You’ll collaborate with product managers, architects, and other engineers to shape the technical direction and ensure the platform delivers 99.99% uptime, performance, and developer delight.

What You'll Do:

• Design, develop, and operate highly available distributed systems for Managed Gateways, ensuring resilience to regional and zonal outages.
• Own and lead delivery of key features/modules, driving them from design through implementation and production rollout.
• Build microservices and control-plane components that power Kong’s Dedicated Cloud Gateways and Serverless Gateways.
• Partner with Product and Engineering teams to deliver new features at scale that directly impact customers’ ability to build, secure, and manage APIs.
• Participate in on-call rotations, owning services in production and driving reliability improvements.
• Write automated tests, observability hooks, and tooling to ensure reliability and reduce toil.
• Assist in the hiring process and help grow and mentor engineers on the team.
• Contribute to shaping the technical roadmap for Managed Gateways, bringing in ideas from infrastructure, networking, and platform engineering.
• Work in a high-velocity, pre-IPO environment, balancing innovation with reliability and customer impact.

What You'll Bring:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 5+ years of experience building high-performance software, ideally in infrastructure or platform engineering.
• Strong experience with Golang
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, networking (L4/L7, DNS, TLS/SSL, HTTP), and cloud-native architectures.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) and container orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Experience building APIs, standardizing APIs in large organizations, and creating API workflows.
• Experience designing and operating systems to deliver 99.99%+ uptime SLAs.
• Proven ability to debug complex systems from bit-and-bytes level (packets, protocols) to high-level design.
• Knowledge of observability and monitoring practices to ensure high availability and performance.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work across teams and geographies.
• Strong sense of ownership, with experience driving features end-to-end and influencing technical direction.