Staff Software Engineer, Metering and Billing

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: On the Konnect Metering & Billing team at Kong, you’ll design, build, and maintain the backend services behind two products: usage metering and billing, and AI Cost Management (Tokenomics), which gives customers visibility and control over what their AI usage costs. As a Backend Engineer, you’ll work closely with Engineering and Product to build scalable services and APIs that process millions of events per second and have a direct, measurable impact on our customers. What you’ll do: - Design, implement, and maintain microservices and APIs for usage metering, billing, invoicing, and analytics at scale. - Build AI Cost Management capabilities that help customers track, attribute, and control LLM token usage and spend, including cost attribution, budgets, and usage limits. - Architect backend systems that process millions of events per second in real time. - Work with Product and Engineering to define system requirements and ship high-quality, customer-focused solutions. - Optimize database performance and ensure data integrity, reliability, and security across distributed systems. - Integrate with third-party services (e.g., Stripe, CRMs) to support billing and reporting needs. - Support production services through monitoring, troubleshooting, and on-call rotation to keep them highly available. - Apply best practices for DevOps, CI/CD, and cloud-native development. - Write automated tests to validate system behavior and prevent regressions. - And any additional tasks required by your manager. What you’ll bring: - Experience with Go, Node.js. - Contributions to open source projects. - Familiarity with cloud-native technologies (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker). - Exposure to big data systems (e.g., ClickHouse), streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka), and event-driven architectures. - 5+ years of professional software development experience. - Proven experience building scalable backend services. - Demonstrated ability to deliver and maintain production systems at scale. - Solid understanding of distributed systems, APIs, and database optimization. - Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Bonus points: - Familiarity with LLM APIs, token-based pricing, or AI gateway and observability tooling. - Experience working on developer-focused products. - Experience working on developer-focused products. About Kong: Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong’s unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit www.konghq.com http://www.konghq.com.