Role overview

Kong is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to architect and build the Agent Marketplace, a foundational platform for machine-to-machine commerce. As a founding member of this zero-to-one engineering squad, you will design the coordination infrastructure for agent-to-API and agent-to-agent transactions, including discovery, identity, billing, and settlement capabilities built on Kong’s runtime stack. This is an autonomous startup unit within Kong focused on establishing the company’s leadership in the agentic era.

Key responsibilities

Design and own the end-to-end full-stack surfaces of the marketplace, delivering high-performance tools, REST API substrate, and developer-facing onboarding systems.
Create the foundational agent-native user experience, including Model Context Protocol server capabilities, sandboxed test environments, and CLI/SDK generation workflows.
Build and scale transaction infrastructure for programmatic identity verification, usage attribution, granular metering, and multi-party settlement with high reliability.
Drive cross-functional execution by partnering with gateway runtime, security, and core teams to integrate marketplace features across Kong’s engineering ecosystem.
Lead architectural design reviews and establish a zero-technical-debt culture while preventing scaling bottlenecks in distributed backend components.
Mentor engineers across the organization by translating product bets into well-defined, modular, and shippable technical milestones.
Own the complete technical lifecycle by writing detailed engineering documentation and product specifications for every system you architect.

Requirements

Seven or more years of experience engineering enterprise-grade production software with proven ability to design, build, and support complex distributed systems from the ground up.
Expert-level proficiency with modern backend languages such as Golang or similar systems languages, combined with deep architectural knowledge of API infrastructure, Kubernetes, and cloud-native patterns.
Extensive hands-on experience developing autonomous agent applications, tool-calling systems, prompt loops, or systems designed for machine consumption.
Deep operational knowledge of multi-tenant architectures, usage-based metering pipelines, billing integration patterns, and secure data exchange layers.
Strong written communication and technical articulation skills with comfort working in remote, globally distributed engineering environments, with West Coast/Bay Area time zone alignment preferred.

What makes this role worth considering

This position offers the opportunity to shape a foundational platform at a critical moment in AI infrastructure evolution. You will work with a founding team operating as an autonomous unit within Kong, directly influencing the company’s technical direction and market position in the agentic era while maintaining significant autonomy in architectural decisions and technical culture.