Software Engineer, AI Gateway - Milan

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Speed up time to market by unleashing developer productivity, automating security, and streamlining API management.

Kong

Employee count: 201-500

Italy only

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:

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 be doing:

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.
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
- Hands on experience with Rust

Bonus Points:

Hands on experience with NGINX/OpenResty/Kong/LuaJIT.
Hands on experience with Envoy or Istio.

About Kong:

Kong Inc., a leading developer of cloud API technologies, is on a mission to enable companies around the world to become “API-first” and securely accelerate AI adoption. Kong helps organizations globally — from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises — unleash developer productivity, build securely, and accelerate time to market. For more information about Kong, please visit www.konghq.com or follow us on X @thekonginc.

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About the job

Apply before

Dec 02, 2025

Posted on

Oct 03, 2025

Job type

Full Time

Experience level

Mid-level

Location requirements

Italy

Hiring timezones

Italy +/- 0 hours

Job categories

AI ML Engineer AI Software Developer AI Engineer Mid Level AI Engineer Software Engineer

Skills

API Management Proxy Load Balancing Profiling Distributed Systems Linux Networking Rust Nginx OpenResty Kong LuaJIT Istio Linux

About Kong

Learn more about Kong and their company culture.

View company profile

Speed up time to market by unleashing developer productivity, automating security, and streamlining API management.

Kong powers the API world

Kong provides the foundation that enables any company to become an API-first company — speeding up time to market, creating new business opportunities, and delivering superior products and services.

Built on the world’s most adopted API gateway, Kong’s unified cloud API platform delivers fast, reliable, secure digital experiences. With Kong, organizations can increase developer productivity, security, and performance at scale with a single easy-to-use platform for API management, service mesh, and ingress controller.

We put customers at the heart of everything we do. That’s why everyone from e-commerce startups to the world’s leading biotech companies trust Kong to run mission-critical applications.

We embody open source and everything it stands for. We foster a culture of individualism — encouraging our people to bring new ideas and innovations, regardless of level and function.

How we do it

We’re passionate about solving the challenges that will fundamentally shape the future of tech. If you believe in taking ownership of your work, making an impact, and having fun along the way, come join us!

Global: Be Inclusive. We work together from anywhere to achieve our common goals. Our differences make us stronger.

Real: Be Authentic. We are genuine, pricipled and confident without arrogance. Show respect and kindness, especially in tough moments.

Unstoppable: Be Relentlessly Resourceful. We work with purpose, obsession and grit. It takes muscle to do hard things and doing hard things builds muscle.

Champions: Be Customer Obsessed. We care. Customers are everything, we put them at the center of everything you do. We are all empowered to make an impact.

Explorers: Be Curious. We value ideas over hierarchy. Never accept the status quo. We make bold bets, fail, and learn everyday. There is always a way.

Own It: Be an owner. We are drivers not passengers and own the quality and outcomes of our work.