Platform Engineer, Specialist

The Vanguard Group; United States; Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

The Vanguard Group seeks a skilled API gateway engineer with deep Kong experience to design, deploy, and operate robust API infrastructure. You will work across the gateway, plugins, and integrations, balancing production support with new development work while maintaining strong security practices.

Ideal candidates will be fluent in REST/OpenAPI, TDD/BDD, and modern CI/CD pipelines, with a focus on reliability, performance testing, and cross-team collaboration in a hybrid work environment.

Qualifications

• Experience with Kong Gateway and Kong Konnect for API management.
• Strong testing, validation, and deployment practices in production environments.
• Proficient in troubleshooting distributed systems and tracing requests across a stack.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate changes for impact and risk; validate thoroughly.
• Build, test, deploy, and support Kong configurations and integrations.
• Troubleshoot production issues and trace requests across the full stack.
• Conduct performance, load, resiliency, and API testing.
• Apply security patches and implement security controls.

Skills

Agile methodologies

DevOps mindset

API consumer empathy

Testing and validation

Communication skills

Collaboration

Self-directed

Tools

Kong Gateway

Kong Konnect

Docker

AWS ECS

CloudFormation

OpenTelemetry

Splunk

Job description

Team Fit Growth mindset with an \"if I don't know it, I can learn it\" attitude. Experience working in Agile and \"you build it, you run it\" environments. Strong client communication and collaboration skills. Self-directed, thorough in testing and validation, and comfortable balancing production support with new development work. Empathy for both API producers and consumers.

Core 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.

Technical Expertise

API Gateway & Kong. Deep experience with Kong Gateway/Konnect, including services, routes, consumers, plugins, declarative configuration (decK), DB-less mode, Admin API, Control Plane/Data Plane architecture, and custom plugin development. Strong understanding of API gateway patterns, request/response lifecycles, traffic management, service abstraction, ingress/egress routing, and upstream/downstream services. Knowledge of Kong plugin execution, lifecycle management, standardization, and configuration governance.

Core Technology Stack

Experience across networking, security, gateway, and delivery layers, including DNS, TLS, load balancing, authentication, authorization, rate limiting, routing, CI/CD, and configuration management. Strong experience with Docker, AWS ECS, containerized environments, infrastructure provisioning, horizontal scaling, secrets management, and platform operations. Familiarity with CloudFormation, infrastructure-as-code, high availability, resiliency patterns, failover strategies, and multi-region deployments.

Development & APIs

Proficiency in Java, Python, Node.js, TypeScript, or similar languages; Lua preferred. Strong understanding of REST APIs, OpenAPI/Swagger, API versioning, contract testing, microservices architecture, and YAML-based configuration. Experience developing and supporting API integrations for internal and external consumers.

Testing & Quality

Experience with performance, load, contract, resiliency, and automated testing. Strong knowledge of TDD/BDD methodologies, API testing practices, and validation frameworks. Experience with chaos engineering and large-scale configuration testing preferred.

Observability & Operations

Expertise tracing requests across distributed systems and distinguishing gateway versus backend issues. Experience using Splunk, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry, logging, telemetry, metrics analysis, alerting, incident response, and performance troubleshooting.

Security

Proven experience applying security patches and managing production security controls. Strong understanding of OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWT, mTLS, threat protection, authorization models, rate limiting, vulnerability remediation, and DevSecOps practices. Ability to quickly learn enterprise security platforms and authentication frameworks.

Additional Preferred Experience

API lifecycle management, governance, onboarding, policy enforcement, and standardized gateway patterns. External partner integrations, vendor connectivity, hybrid-cloud routing, and enterprise boundary security. Developer enablement, onboarding support, documentation, templates, and best‑practice implementation.

Special Factors

Sponsorship. Vanguard is not offering visa sponsorship for this position.

About Vanguard

At Vanguard, we don't just have a mission—we're on a mission. To work for the long-term financial wellbeing of our clients. To lead through product and services that transform our clients' lives. To learn and develop our skills as individuals and as a team. From Malvern to Melbourne, our mission drives us forward and inspires us to be our best.

How We Work

Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for the majority of our crew members, designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning, collaboration, and connection. We believe our mission-driven and highly collaborative culture is a critical enabler to support long‑term client outcomes and enrich the employee experience. Vanguard, one of the world's leading investment management companies, serves individual investors, institutions, employer-sponsored retirement plans, and financial professionals. We have a diverse and talented crew with a culture that promotes teamwork, along with an unwavering focus on serving our clients' best interests.

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