Forward-Deployed AI & API Solutions Engineer

Linuxconfig; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong Inc. is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join its growing Professional Services group, helping enterprise customers accelerate adoption of Kong’s API and AI Connectivity platform.

In this role you will design and implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on‑prem environments, build automation, lead migrations from legacy systems, and collaborate with product engineering, security, and customer teams to deliver measurable business outcomes.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in customer-facing engineering or similar roles.
• Hands-on software engineering and implementation experience.
• Experience with API gateways, management, or distributed systems.
• Strong Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure expertise.
• Experience with automation frameworks and CI/CD tooling.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments.
• Lead hands-on implementation for API gateways, AI gateways, service mesh, and developer portals.
• Build automation frameworks, migration tooling, and reusable accelerators.
• Drive migration initiatives from legacy API management platforms to Kong.
• Collaborate with customer developers, platform teams, architects, and security teams to solve challenges.
• Develop production-grade code, scripts, plugins, CI/CD integrations, Kubernetes automation, and infrastructure tooling.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering to influence roadmap priorities.
• Create reusable best practices, reference architectures, and design patterns.
• Support strategic customer initiatives involving AI connectivity and cloud-native transformation.

Skills

Kubernetes

Cloud architecture

CI/CD pipelines

Automation tooling

API gateways

Linux

Tools

Terraform

Helm

Ansible

GitOps

Python

Job description

Kong Inc. is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join its growing Professional Services group, helping enterprise customers accelerate adoption of Kong’s API and AI Connectivity platform.

In this role you will design and implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on‑prem environments, build automation, lead migrations from legacy systems, and collaborate with product engineering, security, and customer teams to deliver measurable business outcomes.