Customer-Facing API & AI Solutions Engineer

Cacheflow; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join our Professional Services team. This role is customer-facing and focused on accelerating adoption of Kong's API and AI Connectivity platform through hands-on implementation, automation, migration tooling, and solution engineering.

You will work directly with customer engineering teams to solve complex technical challenges, accelerate migrations, build reusable automation, and deliver production‑grade solutions

Qualifications

• 8+ years in customer-facing engineering or similar roles.
• Strong hands-on software engineering and implementation experience.
• Experience with API gateways, API management, 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.

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

8+ years exp

Kubernetes

Python/Go/Java

CI/CD

Terraform

GitOps

Linux

Cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP)

API gateways

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Helm

CI/CD tooling

GitOps

Job description

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join our Professional Services team. This role is customer-facing and focused on accelerating adoption of Kong's API and AI Connectivity platform through hands-on implementation, automation, migration tooling, and solution engineering.

You will work directly with customer engineering teams to solve complex technical challenges, accelerate migrations, build reusable automation, and deliver production‑grade solutions