Customer-Facing API & AI Connectivity Engineer

Cacheflow; Northern (KY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong is seeking an experienced Forward Deployed Engineer to join our Professional Services team in a customer-facing role. You will implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on‑prem environments, drive migrations from legacy platforms, and build automation to accelerate customer adoption.

You will collaborate with Solutions Architects, Product teams, and customer engineers to deliver production-grade solutions and influence product direction based on field learnings.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in customer-facing engineering or related roles.
• Strong hands-on software engineering and implementation experience.
• Experience with API gateways, API management, integrations, or distributed systems platforms.
• Strong Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure expertise.
• Experience building automation frameworks, deployment tooling, CI/CD pipelines, or migration tooling.
• Strong proficiency in Linux, networking, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps practices.
• Experience with major cloud providers including AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Programming experience in Python, Go, Java, JavaScript, or Lua.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and automation tooling such as Terraform, Helm, Ansible, or GitOps frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Partner directly with enterprise customers to design, build, and implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments.
• Lead hands-on implementation efforts for API gateways, AI gateways, service mesh, developer portals, and related connectivity technologies.
• Build automation frameworks, migration tooling, custom integrations, and reusable accelerators to simplify customer adoption and modernization efforts.
• Drive migration initiatives from legacy API management platforms to Kong.
• Work closely with customer developers, platform teams, architects, security teams, and executives to solve complex technical and operational challenges.
• Develop production-grade code, scripts, plugins, CI/CD integrations, Kubernetes automation, and infrastructure tooling as part of customer engagements.
• Collaborate with Kong Product and Engineering teams to influence roadmap priorities based on real-world customer feedback and implementation learnings.
• Create reusable best practices, technical assets, reference architectures, documentation, and design patterns to scale delivery excellence across the organization.
• Support strategic customer initiatives involving AI connectivity, governance, platform modernization, and cloud-native transformation.

Skills

Kubernetes

Cloud-native infrastructure

Automation frameworks

API gateways

Programming (Python/Go/Java/JS/Lua)

CI/CD pipelines

Linux

DevOps practices

Customer-facing engineering

Tools

Terraform

Helm

Ansible

GitOps

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Kong is seeking an experienced Forward Deployed Engineer to join our Professional Services team in a customer-facing role. You will implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on‑prem environments, drive migrations from legacy platforms, and build automation to accelerate customer adoption.

You will collaborate with Solutions Architects, Product teams, and customer engineers to deliver production-grade solutions and influence product direction based on field learnings.