Senior Software Engineer

About this role

Senior Software Engineer

Agents don’t wait for approval. They call models, tools, and APIs thousands of times before anyone reads the first answer. Someone has to decide which of those calls go through, what they’re allowed to cost, and who’s accountable for them.

That’s Zuplo: the unified gateway for APIs and AI — one programmable policy engine for the models your apps call and the agents that call you. Teams route their AI and MCP traffic through our AI Gateway and MCP Gateway, so every agent call is accounted for.

We’re hiring a Senior Software Engineer to help build and run it.

You’ll own major pieces of the gateway runtime, the control plane, and the systems that keep them reliable. Our stack spans Kubernetes, several clouds, and the edge, and we care more about how fast you learn than which tools you already know.

What you’ll do

• Design how agents making thousands of model and MCP tool calls are authenticated, metered, rate-limited, and observed.
• Ship new guardrails and routing policies for the AI Gateway, such as model fallback, spend caps, and prompt-injection checks, behind canaries, alerts, and a clear rollback.
• Build and operate the services behind all of this across Kubernetes, multiple clouds, and the edge, mostly in TypeScript and Go, with some Rust.
• Own what you ship in production. When a customer reports something vague, you take it to a root cause, a fix, and a dashboard so it can’t hide again.
• Work across the rest of Zuplo too. API management (portal, keys, rate limits, GitOps) and our monetization service run on the same policy engine.
• Keep what’s already shipped healthy, including the customer issues that make it to engineering.
• Improve how we ship, from CI/CD to infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar).
• Work with product, developer experience, and customers to turn a fuzzy idea into a scoped plan, then ship it end to end.

What you bring

Required:

• Experience (typically 5+ years) building and running distributed systems in production.
• Hands-on Kubernetes experience, or proof that you can get there fast. Tell us about a time you picked up an unfamiliar system quickly.
• Fluency in TypeScript/Node.js or Go, and a willingness to work in the other.
• Experience with AWS or GCP.
• Working knowledge of networking: DNS, TLS, and load balancing.
• Experience with CI/CD, observability, and incident response (for example, Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry).

Preferred:

• Hands-on experience with LLM APIs, MCP, or agent frameworks, and with the security, cost, and reliability problems that come with them.
• Experience building or running proxies, gateways, or edge and serverless runtimes.
• Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid deployments.

How you work

• You use AI every day, and you can explain what it built: why it works and what it could break.
• You care about alignment. You want to know that systems and agents are doing what we intended, and you build ways to find out fast when they aren’t.
• You care more about impact than about the code itself, and you reach for the 80/20 solution first.
• You’re relentlessly resourceful, with a bias toward doing things today.
• You fix what’s broken, whether or not it’s yours.

About Zuplo

Zuplo was founded by the folks behind Auth0’s developer experience and Azure API Management. What drives us is building products developers love to use.

We are not a 9-to-5 company. Hours are flexible, and we expect high output and quality. We work hard, learn fast, and push boundaries. We respect work-life balance, and we also expect real commitment when deadlines approach or challenges arise. In return, you’ll grow fast and make a real impact on a fast-growing company going after a multi-billion dollar market. If you want your contributions recognized and your skills challenged, alongside a team that cares as much as you do, Zuplo is the place for you.

What we offer

• Competitive salary, plus equity options so you share in what we build.
• Unlimited PTO. We encourage everyone to take at least 20 days off a year.
• Flexible working hours.
• Funded team off-sites in beautiful and fun locations.
• A high-end MacBook Pro and the best tools available.
• Continuous learning and professional development, including exploring new AI tools.

Location and work authorization

In the San Francisco Bay Area, you’ll work from our office three days a week. Elsewhere in North America, the role is remote. You must already be authorized to work in the country where you’re based. We’re unable to sponsor visas for this role.

Interview process

1. Initial screening with our CTO
2. Take-home exercise (a few hours)
3. Technical interview with the rest of the team over Zoom
4. Final conversations with our founder and co-founder

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