Senior Staff Software Engineer - Agent Marketplace

The Role

The Mission Architect at Kong is responsible for designing, building, and scaling the coordination fabric for agent-to-API and agent-to-agent transactions. This includes discovery, identity, billing, and settlement, built directly on top of Kong’s world-class runtime stack.

Responsibilities

• 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 Kong's 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 team's 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.

Requirements

• 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).

Qualifications

N/A

Skills

• Experience with modern backend stacks (Golang or similar systems languages)
• Expertise in API infrastructure, Kubernetes, and cloud-native patterns
• Hands-on experience with autonomous agent applications and tool-calling systems
• Familiarity with multi-tenant architectures, usage-based metering pipelines, billing integration patterns, and secure data exchange layers
• Strong written communication and technical articulation skills

Benefits

N/A

Pay

$220K - $270K

Schedule

N/A