Sr. Systems Engineer – AI Gateway Platform(Remote)

CrowdStrike, Inc.; California; Hybrid; USD 125,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity awards

Health insurance

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

CrowdStrike is seeking an experienced Senior Systems Engineer to own, scale, and secure our enterprise Kong AI Gateway platform as a pivotal part of the AI Platform Enablement team. You will enable resilient connectivity for AI workloads, manage identity controls, and collaborate with security and product teams to deliver scalable gateway solutions.

The role requires extensive experience with containerized deployments, CI/CD workflows, and secure by design principles in a fast-paced enterprise

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional engineering experience in large-scale systems.
• Experience with API gateway architecture and secure-by-design practices.
• Strong background in IAM, OAuth 2.0, and mTLS concepts.
• Proficiency with Kubernetes deployments and CI/CD automation.

Responsibilities

• Operate and scale the enterprise Kong AI Gateway platform with high availability.
• Implement secure routing for MCP servers, tools, and agents across services.
• Design IAM controls and manage SSL/TLS/mTLS lifecycles.
• Collaborate with product and security teams in an Agile environment.

Skills

Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

IAM

OpenTelemetry

API gateway

Tools

GitLab CI/CD

cert-manager

Go/TypeScript

Job description

As a global leader in cybersecurity, CrowdStrike protects the people, processes and technologies that drive modern organizations. Since 2011, our mission hasn’t changed — we’re here to stop breaches, and we’ve redefined modern security with the world’s most advanced AI-native platform. We work on large scale distributed systems, processing almost 3 trillion events per day and this traffic is growing daily. Our customers span all industries, and they count on CrowdStrike to keep their businesses running, their communities safe and their lives moving forward. We're proud to work for a mission-driven company leveraging AI to transform the way we work. CrowdStrikers drive their careers through flexibility and autonomy while also being expected to contribute to a culture of responsible AI adoption, experimentation, and innovation. We use an AI-first mindset as a force multiplier to proactively and continuously accelerate execution, build expertise, uncover insights, and solve complex problems. We’re always looking to add talented CrowdStrikers to the team who have limitless passion, a relentless focus on innovation and a fanatical commitment to our customers, our community and each other. Ready to join a mission that matters? The future of cybersecurity starts with you.

As a global leader in cybersecurity, CrowdStrike protects the people, processes and technologies that drive modern organizations. Since 2011, our mission hasn’t changed — we’re here to stop breaches, and we’ve redefined modern security with the world’s most advanced AI-native platform. We work on large scale distributed systems, processing almost 3 trillion events per day and this traffic is growing daily. Our customers span all industries, and they count on CrowdStrike to keep their businesses running, their communities safe and their lives moving forward. We're proud to work for a mission-driven company leveraging AI to transform the way we work. CrowdStrikers drive their careers through flexibility and autonomy while also being expected to contribute to a culture of responsible AI adoption, experimentation, and innovation. We use an AI-first mindset as a force multiplier to proactively and continuously accelerate execution, build expertise, uncover insights, and solve complex problems. We’re always looking to add talented CrowdStrikers to the team who have limitless passion, a relentless focus on innovation and a fanatical commitment to our customers, our community and each other. Ready to join a mission that matters? The future of cybersecurity starts with you.

About the Role:

CrowdStrike is seeking an experienced Senior Systems Engineer to own, scale, and secure our enterprise Kong AI Gateway platform as a core technical pillar of the AI Platform Enablement team. This senior engineer will own the technical execution of a governed enterprise AI connectivity platform, helping CrowdStrike build a resilient infrastructure layer ready for broad internal adoption. This role is focused on enabling the internal platform plumbing, traffic management, and infrastructure that connect AI workloads—including Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, agent skills, and autonomous agents—with core CrowdStrike enterprise services, cloud-hosted foundation models (AWS Bedrock), and critical SaaS platforms (Slack, Jira, Salesforce, Google). You will partner closely with product managers, Enterprise AI teams, application engineers, and security stakeholders to deliver resilient gateway patterns, robust identity and access controls, and secure, scalable AI connectivity across the enterprise.

What You'll Do:

• Deploy, configure, and maintain the enterprise Kong AI Gateway platform, ensuring high availability, low latency, and robust runtime performance for high-throughput AI traffic.
• Configure and enable secure routing for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, tools, and agents across internal microservices and external SaaS ecosystems.
• Streamline onboarding for internal consumer applications by provisioning and configuring standard gateway routes, credentials, and access policies for upstream LLM and MCP services.
• Collaborate closely with engineering and product personnel to break down complex technical requirements into iterative, value-driven execution plans within an Agile framework.
• Proactively identify process optimizations, eliminate platform bottlenecks, and drive continuous operational improvements across gateway operations and integration workflows.
• Design and implement enterprise Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls for AI, including OAuth 2.0, Okta integrations, agent/non-human workload identities, and secure identity propagation across MCP tool calls.
• Manage end-to-end SSL/TLS certificate lifecycles, mTLS configurations, and automated certificate renewal and rotation using tools (e.g. cert-manager).
• Enforce AI security guardrails, policy enforcement, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) at the gateway boundary, including prompt injection protection, automated PII/secret redaction, and prompt/response filtering.
• Implement intelligent traffic shaping, load balancing, circuit breakers, automated provider failover, and semantic caching to optimize latency, resilience, and token consumption costs.
• Build and maintain declarative Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) configurations (YAML, Helm) and reusable GitLab CI/CD pipelines to support GitOps-driven gateway deployments.
• Instrument the gateway with OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing and performance metrics, routing structured audit logs into Splunk to establish success metrics for platform usage, latency, and control effectiveness.
• Leverage built-in Kong plugins, with the ability to engineer custom plugins (leveraging Go or Lua for low-latency data plane execution) when novel routing, context injection, or governance needs arise.

What You'll Need:

• 8+ years of professional engineering experience, with familiarity and experience in full-stack application development and enterprise architecture.
• Proven experience supporting and engineering enterprise-scale platforms handling high-volume traffic and complex multi-system integrations.
• Understanding of API gateway architecture, high-throughput traffic management, and secure-by-design operating models in a complex enterprise environment.
• Familiarity with various full-stack functionalities and proficiency in modern programming languages across backend or full-stack environments (e.g., Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go).
• Experience with AI systems and interfaces such as Claude, ChatGPT, or similar.
• Hands-on experience deploying and configuring containerized applications and services within Kubernetes environments.
• Experience building CI/CD automation pipelines and reusable templates using GitLab CI/CD (or equivalent tools), along with declarative infrastructure configurations (YAML, Helm).
• Technical understanding of RESTful APIs, JSON data structures, microservices architectures, and distributed systems design.
• Strong background in Identity and Access Management (IAM), including modern authentication/authorization protocols (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, mTLS) and identity platforms (Okta).
• Experience enterprise observability and executing monitoring and alerting based on defined platform health metrics. (e.g. OpenTelemetry, Splunk).
• Experience with service reliability planning and optimized execution for disaster recovery.
• Experience working in Agile-based engineering teams, with the ability to self-start, operate autonomously, and deliver in a fast-paced environment focused on value-driven outcomes.
• Familiarity with enterprise service delivery and collaboration platforms (Jira, ServiceNow, Slack) for sprint execution, work tracking, incident workflows, and cross-team communication.
• Demonstrated ability to evaluate technical systems from both the service provider and consumer perspectives.
• Ability to partner effectively with security, risk, compliance, infrastructure, and product leaders on sensitive or high-governance API/AI initiatives.
• Proven experience utilizing AI technologies to enhance workflows, optimize processes, and accelerate execution.
• Proven experience with the delivery of enterprise platforms to enable user-driven experiences.

Bonus Qualifications:

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field.
• Experience adopting and utilizing various development and scripting languages to deliver optimized build and peak execution performance (e.g., Go or Lua for low-latency gateway runtime extensions, TypeScript/Node.js or Python for MCP services and integration tooling).
• Experience designing and executing comprehensive volume, feasibility, and automated testing frameworks to validate system scalability, high-throughput traffic handling, and architectural viability under production-scale loads.
• Experience driving security vulnerability management and active remediation across client and backend applications, including automated package, dependency, and container image-based remediation to maintain compliance and secure the software supply chain.

Benefits of Working at CrowdStrike:

• Market leader in compensation and equity awards
• Comprehensive physical and mental wellness programs
• Competitive vacation and holidays for recharge
• Paid parental and adoption leaves
• Professional development opportunities for all employees regardless of level or role
• Employee Networks, geographic neighborhood groups, and volunteer opportunities to build connections
• Vibrant office culture with world class amenities
• Great Place to Work Certified™ across the globe

CrowdStrike is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering a culture of belonging where everyone is valued for who they are and empowered to succeed. We support veterans and individuals with disabilities through our affirmative action program.

CrowdStrike is committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all employees and applicants for employment. The Company does not discriminate in employment opportunities or practices on the basis of race, color, creed, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy or pregnancy-related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or family status, veteran status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical disability (including HIV and AIDS), mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, membership or activity in a local human rights commission, status with regard to public assistance, or any other characteristic protected by law. We base all employment decisions--including recruitment, selection, training, compensation, benefits, discipline, promotions, transfers, lay-offs, return from lay-off, terminations and social/recreational programs--on valid job requirements.

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CrowdStrike participates in the E-Verify program. Notice of E-Verify Participation Right to Work CrowdStrike, Inc. is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices.

The base salary range for this position for all U.S. candidates is $125,000 - $180,000 per year, with eligibility for bonuses, equity grants and a comprehensive benefits package that includes health insurance, 401k and paid time off. For detailed information about the U.S. benefits package, please click here.

Expected Close Date of Job Posting is:12-26-2026

CrowdStrike was founded in 2011 to fix a fundamental problem: The sophisticated attacks that were forcing the world’s leading businesses into the headlines could not be solved with existing malware-based defenses. Founder George Kurtz realized that a brand new approach was needed — one that combines the most advanced endpoint protection with expert intelligence to pinpoint the adversaries perpetrating the attacks, not just the malware.

There’s much more to the story of how Falcon has redefined endpoint protection but there’s only one thing to remember about CrowdStrike: We stop breaches.