About this role

Kong is hiring a mid-level Software Engineer as a remote position. The posting calls out experience with Rust, Kafka, Linux, Networking and roughly 2+ years of relevant work.

Role: Software Engineer
Function: software engineering
Level: mid
Track: Individual contributor
Employment: Full-time
Location: Milan, Italy
Work mode: Remote
Experience: 2+ years
Department: All Cost Center
Posted: Mar 18, 2026

AI Summary

Build and maintain high-performance Kafka protocol proxy for Kong's event gateway platform. Requires 2+ years server-side programming and 2+ years Rust with async experience, plus distributed systems and Linux networking knowledge. Work with distributed team on core features, performance optimization, and protocol expansion.

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Job description

from Kong careers

Are you ready to unlock intelligence?

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:

Kong event-gateway is a new fast growing data plane that brings events to the Kong platform. Developers and architects are adopting Kong event-gateway in production among a large variety of use-cases, and actively help make Kong a better product with their feedback and contributions.

As a Software Engineer in the event gateway team, you will be working on core features of the event gateway, first on the Kafka proxy and later expanding to MQTT, AMQP and other eventing protocols. You will also work closely with engineers of other runtimes on the shared data-plane platform and with engineers of the Konnect SaaS platform.

What you'll be doing:

Responsible for building and maintaining a high performance and flexible proxy of the Kafka protocol.
Architecture, design, and implement new innovative features to extend capabilities of the existing Event Proxy.
Bugs troubleshooting, performance tuning and low-level optimizations.
Work along other data plane engineers to expand the Kong runtime platform.
And any additional tasks required by the manager.

What you'll bring:

2+ years of programming in server-side applications and components.
2+ years of Rust programming experience with understanding of async Rust.
Experience in distributed systems, Linux networking stack and computer systems programming, Kong works with APIs on both L7 and L4 transports and protocols, so this knowledge is required.
Comfortable working with a remotely distributed team.
Strong sense of ownership and excellent verbal and written communication skills -- engineers at Kong write the documentation for their products

Bonus Points:

Hands-on experience with Tokio.
Contributions to Rust open source projects.
Hands-on experience with Kafka internals.

#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, Kong's 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 www.konghq.com.