Role overview

Kong is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join its Professional Services organization. In this customer-facing role, you will work directly with enterprise customers to implement Kong’s API and AI Connectivity platform, helping them accelerate adoption through hands-on engineering, automation development, and solution delivery. You will operate at the intersection of software engineering, architecture, and customer engagement on mission-critical initiatives.

Key responsibilities

Partner 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.
Drive migration initiatives from legacy API management platforms to Kong by working closely with customer developers, platform teams, architects, and security teams.
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.

Requirements

At least 8 years of experience in customer-facing engineering, platform engineering, professional services, site reliability engineering, or software engineering roles.
Strong hands-on software engineering and implementation experience with API gateways, API management, integrations, or distributed systems platforms.
Strong Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure expertise, including experience with major cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Strong proficiency in Linux, networking, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps practices with experience building automation frameworks, deployment tooling, and CI/CD pipelines.
Programming experience in languages such as Python, Go, Java, JavaScript, or Lua, and experience with Infrastructure-as-Code 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.
Strong problem-solving abilities, ability to operate in ambiguous and fast-moving enterprise environments, and excellent communication skills across technical and executive audiences.

What makes this role worth considering

You will work directly with Fortune 50 and Fortune 500 companies on modernizing their most critical systems as they adopt APIs and AI technologies. This role offers significant exposure to cutting-edge cloud-native technologies, distributed systems, and large-scale enterprise architectures, accelerating your technical and professional growth. You will be part of a rapidly growing Professional Services organization that is shaping how enterprises globally adopt modern connectivity platforms.