Enterprise API & AI Connectivity Engineer

Worky; Trenton (NJ); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to join its Professional Services organization. You will work directly with enterprise customers to design, build, and implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on‑prem environments, delivering production-grade code, automation, and migration tooling.

This role emphasizes customer collaboration and impact on modernization outcomes.

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.
• Prior experience 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.

Skills

Kubernetes

Cloud-native

Linux

DevOps

Terraform

CI/CD

Python

Go

Java

JavaScript

Lua

Ansible

GitOps

Tools

Terraform

Helm

Ansible

GitOps

Job description

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to join its Professional Services organization. You will work directly with enterprise customers to design, build, and implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on‑prem environments, delivering production-grade code, automation, and migration tooling.

This role emphasizes customer collaboration and impact on modernization outcomes.