Kong Platform Engineer – API Gateway & DevOps

Vanguard; Horizon City (TX); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Vanguard is seeking an API gateway engineer to design, implement, and support Kong Gateway configurations and integrations across our services. The role emphasizes safe change management, thorough testing, and production readiness in a hybrid work environment where collaboration is key.

You will collaborate with developers, security, and operations to ensure reliable API delivery, performance, observability, and incident response, while applying best practices in CI/CD, logging, and governance.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience with Kong Gateway and API management.
• Strong testing, validation, and production support balancing.
• Experience in Agile and "you build it, you run it" environments.
• Excellent client communication and collaboration skills.
• Empathy for both API producers and consumers.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate changes for impact and risk, implement safely, and validate thoroughly.
• Build, test, deploy, and support Kong Gateway configurations, plugins, integrations, and new capabilities.
• Troubleshoot production issues and trace requests across the full stack from gateway to upstream services.
• Conduct performance, load, resiliency, and API testing.
• Apply security patches, implement security controls, and support incident response.
• Maintain documentation, configuration governance, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment standards.

Skills

Kong Gateway

Docker

AWS ECS

CI/CD

OpenAPI/Swagger

REST APIs

Lua

Java

Python

Node.js

TypeScript

YAML

OpenTelemetry

Splunk

Tools

Docker

AWS ECS

CloudFormation

decK

OpenAPI

Swagger

Job description

Vanguard is seeking an API gateway engineer to design, implement, and support Kong Gateway configurations and integrations across our services. The role emphasizes safe change management, thorough testing, and production readiness in a hybrid work environment where collaboration is key.

You will collaborate with developers, security, and operations to ensure reliable API delivery, performance, observability, and incident response, while applying best practices in CI/CD, logging, and governance.