Forward‑Deployed API & AI Connectivity Engineer

KONG; Trenton (NJ); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join its Professional Services team in the United States. You will work directly with enterprise customers to design and implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments, delivering production-grade automation and migration tooling.

You will collaborate with diverse teams to influence product direction based on field experience and customer feedback, while advancing modern API and AI connectivity platforms for Fortune

Qualifications

• 8+ years in customer-facing engineering or related 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.
• 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.

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

API gateways

Automation

Python

Go

Java

JavaScript

Linux

DevOps

Tools

Terraform

Helm

Ansible

GitOps

Job description

Kong is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join its Professional Services team in the United States. You will work directly with enterprise customers to design and implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments, delivering production-grade automation and migration tooling.

You will collaborate with diverse teams to influence product direction based on field experience and customer feedback, while advancing modern API and AI connectivity platforms for Fortune