Forward Deployed Engineer AI Gateway EMEA

The role

You will lead technical discovery and design runtime architecture for strategic AI use cases. You will build prototypes and integrations to ensure Kong governs real production traffic for enterprise customers.

What you will do

• Lead AI, API and agentic technical discovery with customer teams.
• Design runtime architecture across models, APIs, MCP, identity and policy.
• Build prototypes, integrations, evaluation flows and reference implementations.
• Remove blockers in pilot and production regarding auth, network, observability, latency and cost.
• Own the technical path from pilot to paid.
• Turn builds into reusable patterns.
• Pair with Kong's internal engineering team on AI Gateway and agentic roadmap work.
• Feed field patterns and roadmap requirements back to Product.
• Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering and Customer Success across EMEA.

Required qualifications

• Strong hands-on engineering background building and shipping production software (Go, Python, TypeScript or similar).
• Experience in a customer-facing technical role such as forward-deployed, solutions architecture, staff or principal engineering, or technical consulting.
• Enterprise architecture instincts for identity, network, security and observability constraints.
• Production experience with LLMs and agents, including agent development frameworks and AI engineering principles.
• Experience with API gateways or infrastructure: Kubernetes, service mesh, OAuth/OIDC, mTLS, policy enforcement.
• Credibility with staff engineers and security architects.
• Hands-on experience with MCP, including building or deploying MCP servers.
• Strong written and verbal communication in English.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites across EMEA as needed.

Nice to have

• Additional European languages
• Prior experience at an AI-native, developer-platform or infrastructure company.
• Experience with Kong Gateway, Konnect or other API management platforms.
• Open source contributions, or a track record of publishing reference architectures or patterns.

About the company

Kong Inc. is the AI Connectivity Company building the connectivity layer of AI. Their unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic.