Staff Software Engineer (BackendObservability)

Are you ready to power the Worlds connections

If you dont think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job please apply. Nobody checks every box - were looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas and have some interest and capabilities in others.

About the Role:

Design develop and maintain microservices that power Kong Konnect the Service Connectivity Platform. Working closely with Product Management and teams across Engineering you will develop software that has a direct impact on our customers business and Kongs success.

What you will do:

• Architect and design highly available scalable and secure systems that solve complex business and technical challenges primarily in the observability space

• Lead technical strategy and execution ensuring alignment with product vision and long-term business goals.

• Drive innovation by evaluating new technologies frameworks and approaches to improve performance reliability and developer velocity.

• Design cloud systems that are resilient to regional and zonal outages.

• Participate in an on-call rotation to support services in production ensuring high performance and reliability.

• Analyse and rectify recurring design issues establishing best practices for early detection and prevention within the product team.

• Write and maintain automated tests to ensure code integrity and prevent regressions.

• Collaborate with technical leadership to establish team-wide best practices in microservice architecture design and development.

• Mentor team members and contribute to their growth.

• Deliver hands-on contributions in code design reviews and troubleshooting critical issues in production systems.

What you will bring:

• 8 years working in a team to develop deliver and maintain complex software solutions.

• Understanding of cloud-native systems like Kubernetes GitOps and Terraform.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

• Experience with streaming platforms such as Kafka AWS Kinesis Flink Spark etc.

• Strong background in systems such as large-scale storage indexing/search or observability platforms.

• Operational experience in running large-scale high-performance internet services including on-call responsibilities.

• Expertise with data modelling in NoSQL databases.

• Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g. Java Go C Python).

• Experience with AWS and cloud platforms for SaaS teams.

• Experience in designing prototyping building monitoring and debugging microservices architectures and distributed systems.

Bonus points:

• Experience with storage and search of large datasets using data storage like Druid/Clickhouse/Pinot Iceberg/Athena/Hive OpenSearch/Elasticsearch or similar.

• Expertise in ingestion indexing and search at scale (minimum TBs/day).

• Led a team of engineers from an idea to a polished product

• Experience contributing to Open Source Software projects.

• Experience working or developing L4/L7 proxies such as Nginx HA-proxy Envoy etc.

#LI-PC1

About Kong:

Kong Inc. a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike Kongs unified API and AI platform Kong Konnect enables organizations to secure manage accelerate govern and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information visit .

Required Experience:

Staff IC