EMEA Forward-Deployed AI Gateway Engineer

Kong; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong is seeking a Forward-Deployed Engineer in EMEA to lead the delivery of production-grade AI workloads for enterprise customers. You will partner closely with platform, security, and engineering teams, owning the path from discovery to a running workload in production.

This role emphasizes architecture, security, and scalable patterns in complex environments. You will travel across EMEA, design with real traffic in mind, and drive outcomes beyond demos, turning learnings into reusable

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on engineering background with production softwareExperience.
• Customer-facing technical experience in forward-deployed, solutions architecture, staff or principal engineering roles.
• Enterprise architecture instincts for identity, network, security, and observability in complex environments.
• Working knowledge of LLM/agentic patterns: model APIs, tool calls, MCP, latency and cost trade-offs.
• Experience with API gateways or infrastructure: Kubernetes, service mesh, OAuth/OIDC, mTLS, policy enforcement.
• Credibility with staff engineers and security architects; able to lead technical discussions from whiteboard to code.
• Own outcomes, not tickets, and navigate ambiguity to deliver.
• Strong English communication; other European languages are a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead AI, API and agentic technical discovery with customer platform, security and engineering teams.
• Design runtime architecture across models, APIs, MCP and tool access, identity and policy.
• Build prototypes, integrations, evaluation flows and reference implementations proving Kong governs real production traffic.
• Remove blockers in pilot and production: auth, network, observability, latency and cost.
• Own the technical path from pilot to paid and see workloads through to running state.
• Turn work into reusable patterns to accelerate future deals.
• Spend time embedded with Kong's internal engineering team on AI Gateway and roadmap work.
• Feed field patterns and roadmap-critical requirements back to Product.
• Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering and Customer Success across EMEA on strategic AI opportunities.

Skills

Go

Python

TypeScript

APIs

Security

Kubernetes

Tools

Kubernetes

OAuth/OIDC

API gateways

Konnect

Open source

Job description

Kong is seeking a Forward-Deployed Engineer in EMEA to lead the delivery of production-grade AI workloads for enterprise customers. You will partner closely with platform, security, and engineering teams, owning the path from discovery to a running workload in production.

This role emphasizes architecture, security, and scalable patterns in complex environments. You will travel across EMEA, design with real traffic in mind, and drive outcomes beyond demos, turning learnings into reusable