API Platform Engineer: Developer Portal & Kong

United Airlines; Chicago, Northern (IL, KY); Hybrid; USD 90,000 - 117,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

Flight privileges

Paid time off

401(k)

Job summary

United Airlines is seeking a Developer to build and enhance features in the Internal Developer Portal and to evolve United’s API ecosystem from Chicago. The role emphasizes API platform ownership, Kong gateway management, and applying reliability practices to improve platform stability and observability.

The ideal candidate will bring strong software engineering experience, API tooling expertise, and a focus on security, scalability, and cross-team collaboration to enable secure, resilient

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in a related field.
• Experience in software engineering with cloud-native development and automation.
• Hands-on experience with AWS services and Infrastructure as Code (AWS CDK).
• Proficient in at least one language (e.g., .NET, Java, Python, JavaScript, or Go).
• Experience building developer portals or internal platforms using React and TypeScript.

Responsibilities

• Develop and enhance features within the Internal Developer Portal to improve developer self-service, API discoverability, onboarding, and platform adoption.
• Own, support, and improve the Kong API platform, including gateway config, routing, policies, plugins, and security controls.
• Collaborate with application teams to design, publish, secure, and manage APIs with scalable patterns for governance and reliability.
• Create reusable developer experiences, templates, documentation, and automation for provisioning, deployment, monitoring, and operation of API services.
• Apply site reliability engineering practices to improve availability, observability, incident response, performance, and operational readiness.

Skills

Cloud-native development

React

TypeScript

Cross-functional collaboration

Communication

Leadership

Security best practices AWS

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

AWS CDK

Job description

United Airlines is seeking a Developer to build and enhance features in the Internal Developer Portal and to evolve United’s API ecosystem from Chicago. The role emphasizes API platform ownership, Kong gateway management, and applying reliability practices to improve platform stability and observability.

The ideal candidate will bring strong software engineering experience, API tooling expertise, and a focus on security, scalability, and cross-team collaboration to enable secure, resilient