Enterprise API & AI Connectivity Engineer

Kong Inc.

Northern (KY)

Hybrid

USD 140,000 - 190,000

Full time

9 days ago

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Job summary

Kong Inc. is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join its Professional Services team. You will work directly with enterprise customers to design, build, and implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on‑prem environments.

You’ll lead hands‑on implementations for API gateways, AI gateways, and related connectivity technologies. You will develop automation frameworks, migration tooling, and reusable accelerators, collaborating with customer developers, architects, and executives

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.