What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Software Engineer position at Kong?
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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.
The Mission
Volcano is Kong's most forward-leaning product team — building the infrastructure layer for the agentic era from first principles. We are looking for somebody who can ship a front-end: someone to own the UI layer entirely, so the team can move faster across the full stack. You will build the visual systems that make agent workflows, API log views, and LLM-driven developer tooling feel as precise as the infrastructure underneath them.
What You'll Do
The Toolkit
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.
Compensation Range: $160K - $200K
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.
The Mission
Volcano is Kong's most forward-leaning product team — building the infrastructure layer for the agentic era from first principles. We are looking for somebody who can ship a front-end: someone to own the UI layer entirely, so the team can move faster across the full stack. You will build the visual systems that make agent workflows, API log views, and LLM-driven developer tooling feel as precise as the infrastructure underneath them.
What You'll Do
- Own the entire front-end surface of Volcano — from architecture decisions to the last pixel of a data visualisation — operating as the sole UI authority on the team
- Build log views, chart components, table interfaces, and graph-based agent workflow visualisations that are both technically precise and visually intentional
- Architect front-end systems within a Next.js monorepo that are performant, maintainable, and designed with the full-stack context in mind — not in isolation from it
- Drive collaborative pair design sessions with Mark and the broader Volcano team, iterating quickly and without attachment to prior work when product direction shifts
- Integrate with backend services built in Go — understanding auth flows, API contracts, and where the UI layer fits within the broader system architecture
- Contribute to the upcoming LLM-driven code generation and deployment flow, building web-based text editors, chat interfaces, and dynamic graph visualisations for agent orchestration
- Participate in PR reviews via GitHub, contributing to technical rigour and code quality across the Volcano codebase
The Toolkit
- 5 years of production front-end engineering experience, with a demonstrable track record of owning UI systems end-to-end
- Server-side rendering expertise — deep, practical experience with SSR in a production context; Next.js is the team's primary framework, with Remix or TanStack Start considered equivalent
- React and monorepo proficiency — comfortable operating within large-scale monorepo structures and reasoning about cross-package dependencies
- Full-stack systems fluency — able to reason across authentication architectures, API design, and backend data flows; you understand where front-end decisions have downstream consequences
- Data-heavy UI delivery — experience building log views, chart systems, table interfaces, or graph/node visualisations at a level of quality that goes beyond functional
- AI/LLM working experience — you use AI tooling in your day-to-day development workflow as a matter of course, not as an experiment
- Ownership without ego — you form strong opinions on architecture and design, and you hold them lightly when the product direction changes
- Urgency with craft — you ship, and you care how it looks when it lands
- Collaborative by default — pair sessions, PR reviews, and cross-functional design work are how you do your best thinking, not interruptions to it
- Experience with Go or a working understanding of Go-based backend services
- Exposure to developer tooling, API platforms, or infrastructure-adjacent products (Vercel, Supabase, Netlify, Postman, or equivalent)
- Experience building web-based text editors, chat interfaces, or node/edge graph UIs
- Familiarity with LLM integration patterns — streaming responses, tool use, or agent orchestration in a UI context
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.
Compensation Range: $160K - $200K
Salary : $160,000 - $200,000