Enterprise AI Gateway Engineer – EMEA (Forward-Deployed)

Kong; England (AR); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong is seeking a Forward-Deployed Engineer to drive production-grade AI workloads for customers. You will work with platform, security and engineering teams across EMEA to ensure secure, scalable AI gateway implementations and agentic patterns that endure beyond pilots.

You will own the path from discovery to production, design architectures, build prototypes, and collaborate with internal engineering to accelerate future deals. Strong English and travel across EMEA are required.

Qualifications

• Hands-on engineering with production software in Go, Python or TypeScript.
• Experience in a customer-facing technical role (forward-deployed, solutions architecture, staff/principal engineering).
• Enterprise architecture instincts: design for identity, network, security and observability.
• Working knowledge of LLMs and agentic patterns: model APIs, tool calling, MCP, cost and latency trade-offs.
• Experience with API gateways or infrastructure: Kubernetes, service mesh, OAuth/OIDC, mTLS, policy enforcement.
• Able to converse with staff engineers and security architects, from whiteboard to working code.
• Owns outcomes, comfortable with ambiguity and driving work to done.
• Strong written and spoken English; additional European languages are a plus.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites across EMEA.

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 that prove 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 stay on it until the workload is running.
• Turn what you build into reusable patterns, so the next AI Gateway deal is faster and cheaper to win.
• Spend regular time embedded with Kong's internal engineering team, pairing on AI Gateway and agentic roadmap work.
• Feed field patterns and roadmap-critical requirements straight back to Product, before competitors define the narrative.
• Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering and Customer Success across EMEA on strategic AI opportunities.

Skills

Go

Python

TypeScript

Solutions architecture

Enterprise architecture

LLM patterns

English proficiency

Tools

Kubernetes

OAuth/OIDC

mTLS

Policy enforcement

Job description

Kong is seeking a Forward-Deployed Engineer to drive production-grade AI workloads for customers. You will work with platform, security and engineering teams across EMEA to ensure secure, scalable AI gateway implementations and agentic patterns that endure beyond pilots.

You will own the path from discovery to production, design architectures, build prototypes, and collaborate with internal engineering to accelerate future deals. Strong English and travel across EMEA are required.