Senior Software Engineer, Gateway - Performance

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: This team is responsible for maintaining the core proxy path of the Kong API Gateway product. You need a solid technical background and will work on improving proxy path stability, performance, observability as well as debuggability from top to the very bottom. You will have the opportunity to make sound technical decisions, influence feature design, and ensure timely delivery of objectives.

What you'll do:

• Work on our core proxy stack which is heavily based on Nginx/OpenResty
• Develop new proxy path features such as routing/load balancing/tracing/metrics
• Extend Nginx core to facilitate requirements that are not possible today
• Troubleshoot and profiling performance bottlenecks
• Write automated tests to check the functionality of Gateway
• Design and write performance tests that can demonstrate performance differences between changes/releases
• Collaborate with other team such as the control plane/data team to facilitate end-to-end delivery of new features
• Be active in the Gateway OSS community

What you'll bring:

• 5+ years of experience developing data plane software
• Experience in one of Rust, C, C++
• Experience with low level debugging using GDB/LLDB
• Understanding of process memory usage and troubleshooting techniques
• Understanding of development with Git workflows
• Expertise in test-driven development and automated testing
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Bonus Points:

• Experience in Nginx/OpenResty/Kong or other L4/L7 proxy software
• Expertise in performance profiling techniques such as perf_events, SystemTap, eBPF
• Experience in writing Lua code
• Experience in JIT compiler, such as LuaJIT/V8
• Experience in OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Dynatrace or other observability frameworks
• Experience developing for SaaS platforms
• Previous contributions to Open Source projects

About Kong: Kong is THE cloud native API platform with the fastest, most adopted API gateway in the world (over 300m downloads!). As the innovation leader of cloud API technologies, Kong 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 to market. 83% of web traffic today is API calls! APIs are the connective tissue of the cloud and the underlying technology that allows software to talk and interact with one another. Therefore, we believe that APIs act as the nervous system of the cloud. Our audacious mission is to build the nervous system that will safely and reliably connect all of humankind! For more information about Kong, please visit konghq.com or follow @thekonginc on Twitter. We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.