Senior Software Engineer, Runtime Interpreter (Scheme/Rust)

Are you ready to power the World's connections?

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 is an Open-Core project. Its foundation is the Open-source API Gateway. On top of that there is an Enterprise Gateway, which extends and improves it. The Enterprise Gateway is the central piece of the Kong ecosystem, which includes other pieces of software and infrastructure that add even more value. We are working on a series of exciting projects to further improve the core of the best API Platform for platform builders, and we are looking for a strong Software Engineer who is passionate about Scheme, Rust and implementing interpreters and compilers. The job is fully remote for people in Europe. Kong can currently hire in Ireland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, France or the United Kingdom.

What you'll be doing

• Architecture, design, and implement a Rust based interpreter for a Scheme-based Domain Specific Language.

• Develop tooling to improve the developer experience (playgrounds, documentation, LLM code generation).

• Bugs troubleshooting, performance tuning and low-level optimizations for the interpreter.

• Work with a world-class engineering team distributed around the world.

What you'll bring

• 5+ years of programming, with demonstrable experience in Rust.

• Experience working on designing Scheme-based dialects and implementing their interpreter, preferably in Rust.

• Solid hands-on low-level technical expertise in Linux systems troubleshooting, and profiling.

• 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.

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About 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. For more information about Kong, please visit www.konghq.com or follow us on X @thekonginc.