Forward-Deployed Engineer — API & AI Connectivity

Kong

Arizona

On-site

USD 150,000 - 210,000

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

Kong Inc. is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join our Professional Services team.

You will work directly with Fortune 50/500 customers to design, implement, and scale Kong-based API and AI connectivity solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments. This role emphasizes hands-on coding, migration tooling, and producing production-grade solutions, with collaboration across solutions architects, product teams, and customer success.

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.
Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure expertise.
Experience building automation frameworks, deployment tooling, CI/CD, or migration tooling.

Responsibilities

Partner with enterprise customers to design and implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments.
Lead hands-on implementation for API gateways, AI gateways, service mesh, and developer portals.
Build automation frameworks, migration tooling, and reusable accelerators to speed up adoption.
Drive migrations from legacy API management platforms to Kong.
Collaborate with customer developers, architects, and security teams to solve complex challenges.
Develop production-grade code, scripts, plugins, and CI/CD integrations for engagements.
Influence product roadmap via field experience and learnings.
Create reference architectures, docs, and patterns to scale delivery.