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Kong is seeking a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer to join its Professional Services organization. This is a strategic, 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
- 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
- Collaborate with Kong Product and Engineering teams to influence roadmap priorities based on real-world customer feedback
- Create reusable best practices, technical assets, reference architectures, documentation, and design patterns
- 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 (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
- Programming experience in Python, Go, Java, JavaScript, or Lua
- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and automation tooling such as Terraform, Helm, Ansible, or GitOps frameworks
- Prior experience in API Management, Open Source, Middleware, SaaS, or Infrastructure software companies is highly preferred
PREFERRED ATTRIBUTES:
- Strong builder mindset with 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 strong sense of ownership and accountability
