Senior Staff Software Engineer Agent Marketplace
San Francisco, CA - USA
Job Summary
Are you ready to unlock intelligence
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:
Architect the future of machine-to-machine commerce as a founding member of a zero-to-one engineering squad. You will design build and scale the coordination fabric for agent-to-API and agent-to-agent transactionsspanning discovery identity billing and settlementbuilt directly on top of Kongs world-class runtime stack. Operating as an autonomous startup unit inside Kong this team is responsible for lowering organizational drag unlocking engineering velocity and establishing Kongs absolute leadership in the Agentic Era.
What Youll Do:
Architect and own the end-to-end full-stack surfaces of the marketplace loop delivering high-performance tools the underlying REST API substrate and developer-facing onboarding systems.
Design the foundational agent-native user experience creating robust Model Context Protocol (MCP) server capabilities sandboxed test environments and elegant CLI/SDK generation workflows.
Scale and protect the transaction infrastructure by building high-reliability pipelines for programmatic identity verification usage attribution granular metering and complex multi-party settlement.
Drive cross-functional execution across Kongs engineering ecosystem partnering with gateway runtime security plugins and global core teams to smoothly integrate marketplace features.
Lead architectural design reviews and champion a zero-technical-debt culture while proactively preventing scaling bottlenecks across distributed backend components.
Mentor engineers across the organization multiplying the teams output by translating ambiguous product bets into highly defined modular and shippable technical milestones.
Own the technical lifecycle completely by writing crystal-clear engineering documentation and product specifications for every system you architect.
What Youll Bring:
7 years of experience engineering enterprise-grade production software with a proven capability to design build and support complex distributed systems from scratch.
Master-level expertise with a modern backend stack (such as Golang or similar systems languages) alongside deep architectural command of API infrastructure Kubernetes and cloud-native patterns.
Extensive hands-on experience developing autonomous agent applications tool-calling systems prompt loops or systems designed explicitly for machine consumption.
Deep operational familiarity with multi-tenant architectures usage-based metering pipelines billing integration patterns or secure data exchange layers.
Strong written communication and technical articulation skills with an unwavering comfort operating within remote globally distributed engineering environments (West Coast/Bay Area alignment preferred).
#LI-BR2
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
About Company
Kong is the most widely adopted API gateway and service mesh, powering the world’s APIs for modern architectures. Accelerate development and productivity today!