Staff Forward Deployed Engineer
Build and deploy API, AI connectivity, and cloud-native solutions directly with enterprise customers, including migrations, automation, integrations, and production tooling. Requires 8+ years of engineering experience plus strong Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, programming, and customer-facing implementation skills.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments.
- Implement API gateways, AI gateways, service mesh, developer portals, and related connectivity technologies.
- Build automation frameworks, migration tooling, custom integrations, and reusable accelerators.
- Lead migrations from legacy API management platforms to Kong.
- Develop production-grade code, scripts, plugins, CI/CD integrations, Kubernetes automation, and infrastructure tooling.
- Collaborate with customer developers, platform teams, architects, security teams, executives, and Kong product and engineering teams.
- Create reusable best practices, technical assets, reference architectures, documentation, and design patterns.
- Support customer initiatives involving AI connectivity, governance, platform modernization, and cloud-native transformation.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in customer-facing engineering, platform engineering, professional services, site reliability engineering, or software engineering.
- 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.
- Proficiency in Linux, networking, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps practices.
- Experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
- Programming experience in Python, Go, Java, JavaScript, or Lua.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code and automation tools such as Terraform, Helm, Ansible, or GitOps frameworks.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience in API management, open source, middleware, SaaS, or infrastructure software companies.
- Ability to solve complex technical problems with minimal supervision in ambiguous, fast-moving enterprise environments.
- Strong customer-facing communication and collaboration skills across technical and executive audiences.
- Interest in modern infrastructure, APIs, AI, and cloud-native technologies.
Compensation
- Annual salary range: $192,010–$274,300.
Skills
Api Gateways, Kubernetes, Cloud-Native Infrastructure, CI/CD, Linux, Networking, AWS, Azure, GCP, Python, Go, Terraform, Helm, Ansible, GitOps
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