Forward Deployed Engineer

The role

This role involves helping enterprise customers accelerate adoption of Kong's API and AI Connectivity platform. You will work alongside customer engineering teams to implement solutions, build automation, and drive migrations.

What you will do

• Partner with enterprise customers to design, build, and implement Kong-based solutions.
• Lead hands-on implementation for API gateways, AI gateways, service mesh, and developer portals.
• Build automation frameworks, migration tooling, custom integrations, and reusable accelerators.
• Drive migration initiatives from legacy API management platforms to Kong.
• Work with customer developers, platform teams, architects, security teams, and executives.
• Develop production-grade code, scripts, plugins, CI/CD integrations, and Kubernetes automation.
• Collaborate with Kong Product and Engineering teams to influence roadmap priorities.
• Create reusable best practices, technical assets, reference architectures, and documentation.
• Support strategic customer initiatives involving AI connectivity and cloud-native transformation.

Required qualifications

• 8+ years in customer-facing engineering, platform engineering, professional services, site reliability engineering, or software engineering roles.
• Strong hands-on software engineering and implementation experience.
• Experience with API gateways, API management, integrations, or distributed systems platforms.
• Strong Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure expertise.
• Experience building automation frameworks, deployment tooling, CI/CD pipelines, or migration tooling.
• Strong proficiency in Linux, networking, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps practices.
• Experience with major cloud providers including AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Programming experience in languages such as Python, Go, Java, JavaScript, or Lua.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and automation tooling such as Terraform, Helm, Ansible, or GitOps frameworks.

Nice to have

• Prior experience working in API Management, Open Source, Middleware, SaaS, or Infrastructure software companies
• Strong builder mindset with the ability to solve complex technical problems with minimal supervision
• Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving enterprise environments
• Passion for working directly with customers and delivering measurable business outcomes
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills across technical and executive audiences
• Highly organized with strong prioritization and execution skills
• Passion for innovation, modern infrastructure, APIs, AI, and cloud-native technologies
• Team-oriented with a strong sense of ownership and accountability

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.