Software Engineer, Core Platform

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. Come Power the World's Connections? About the IAM Team at Kong: Kong Inc., a leading developer of cloud API technologies, is on a mission to enable companies around the world to become "API-first" and securely accelerate AI adoption. Kong helps organizations globally — from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises — unleash developer productivity, build securely, and accelerate time to market. The IAM Team is responsible for building and maintaining the identity and access management systems that secure Kong Konnect and the Developer Portal. We develop the authentication and authorization services that protect millions of API requests daily, enabling secure access control for enterprise customers and developers worldwide. Our systems power fine-grained permissions, role-based access control, and seamless identity experiences across Kong's platform. About the role: The Software Engineer will be a key contributor to the IAM Team, building scalable backend services for Kong Konnect and the Developer Portal. You'll develop microservices in Golang that handle identity management, access control, and permissions enforcement for Kong's multi-tenant platform. This role requires strong platform engineering fundamentals, Golang proficiency, microservices architecture experience, and cloud-native development on AWS and Kubernetes. You'll learn and grow your expertise in IAM technologies while building production systems at scale. What you'll do: Develop and maintain backend microservices in Golang that power authentication and authorization for Kong Konnect and Developer Portal. Build scalable APIs that integrate identity and access management capabilities across Kong's product ecosystem. Deploy and manage services on AWS using Kubernetes for container orchestration and high availability. Implement secure, performant backend services that handle high-volume traffic and enforce access control policies. Collaborate with senior engineers and security teams to learn and implement IAM best practices. Work with product managers and other engineering teams to deliver features that enhance developer and enterprise user experiences. Write clean, maintainable, well-tested code with comprehensive unit, integration, and end-to-end tests. Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and architecture planning. Monitor and optimize service performance, reliability, and security through observability tools and continuous improvement. Participate in on-call rotation to ensure high availability of platform services. Contribute to building a culture of engineering excellence and security-first development. What you'll bring: 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend services and distributed systems. Strong proficiency in Golang with experience building production microservices. Strong experience with API development and design (REST, gRPC) and building API-first services. Experience building and deploying microservices architectures in production environments. Hands-on experience with AWS services (EKS, ECS, Lambda, DynamoDB, RDS, S3, etc.). Experience with Kubernetes including deployment, scaling, and managing containerized applications. Understanding of distributed systems concepts and building highly available, fault-tolerant services. Knowledge of security best practices for backend services including secure credential storage and secret management. Experience with multi-tenancy and building services that serve multiple customers. Experience with Continuous Integration/Delivery pipelines and tools such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins. Experience with database systems (SQL and NoSQL) and data modeling. Solid computer science