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Kong is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to join its Professional Services organization. This is a customer-facing engineering role focused on helping enterprise customers accelerate adoption of Kong's API and AI Connectivity platform through hands-on implementation, automation, migration tooling, and solution engineering.
You will work directly alongside customer engineering teams to solve complex technical challenges, accelerate migrations, build reusable automation, and deliver production-grade solutions in real-world enterprise environments. You will operate at the intersection of software engineering, architecture, platform engineering, and customer delivery.
Key responsibilities include:
- Partner directly with enterprise customers to design, build, and implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments
- Lead hands-on implementation efforts for API gateways, AI gateways, service mesh, developer portals, and related connectivity technologies
- Build automation frameworks, migration tooling, custom integrations, and reusable accelerators to simplify customer adoption and modernization efforts
- Drive migration initiatives from legacy API management platforms to Kong
- Work closely with customer developers, platform teams, architects, security teams, and executives to solve complex technical and operational challenges
- Develop production-grade code, scripts, plugins, CI/CD integrations, Kubernetes automation, and infrastructure tooling as part of customer engagements
- Collaborate with Kong Product and Engineering teams to influence roadmap priorities based on real-world customer feedback and implementation learnings
- Create reusable best practices, technical assets, reference architectures, documentation, and design patterns to scale delivery excellence across the organization
- Support strategic customer initiatives involving AI connectivity, governance, platform modernization, and cloud-native transformation
This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy building, coding, solving ambiguous problems, and working directly with customers on mission-critical initiatives involving APIs, AI gateways, service connectivity, modernization, and cloud-native platforms.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 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
- Prior experience working in API Management, Open Source, Middleware, SaaS, or Infrastructure software companies is highly preferred
Preferred attributes include: strong builder mindset, comfort 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, strong organizational and prioritization skills, passion for innovation and modern infrastructure, and team-oriented with strong ownership and accountability.
