Customer-Facing API & AI Platform Engineer

Kong

United States

Remote

USD 180,000 - 240,000

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join its Professional Services organization. This role pairs hands-on software development with strategic advisory work for Fortune 50/500 customers, focusing on Kong's API and AI connectivity platform across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments.

You will design and implement production-grade solutions, build automation, migrate legacy systems, and contribute to reusable accelerators.

Qualifications

8+ years in customer-facing engineering, platform engineering, professional services, site reliability engineering, or software engineering 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 languages such as Python, Go, Java, JavaScript, or Lua.
Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and automation tooling such as Terraform, Helm, Ansible, or GitOps frameworks.
Prior experience working in API Management, Open Source, Middleware, SaaS, or Infrastructure software companies is highly preferred.

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.