Sr. Systems Engineer – AI Gateway Platform(Remote)

Overview

Senior Systems Engineer to own, scale, and secure CrowdStrike's enterprise Kong AI Gateway platform as a core technical pillar of the AI Platform Enablement team.

What you'll do

• Deploy, configure, and maintain the enterprise Kong AI Gateway platform, ensuring high availability, low latency, and robust runtime performance for high-throughput AI traffic.
• Configure and enable secure routing for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, tools, and agents across internal microservices and external SaaS ecosystems.
• Streamline onboarding for internal consumer applications by provisioning and configuring standard gateway routes, credentials, and access policies for upstream LLM and MCP services.
• Collaborate closely with engineering and product personnel to break down complex technical requirements into iterative, value-driven execution plans within an Agile framework.
• Proactively identify process optimizations, eliminate platform bottlenecks, and drive continuous operational improvements across gateway operations and integration workflows.
• Design and implement enterprise Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls for AI, including OAuth 2.0, Okta integrations, agent/non-human workload identities, and secure identity propagation across MCP tool calls.
• Manage end-to-end SSL/TLS certificate lifecycles, mTLS configurations, and automated certificate renewal and rotation using tools (e.g. cert-manager).
• Enforce AI security guardrails, policy enforcement, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) at the gateway boundary, including prompt injection protection, automated PII/secret redaction, and prompt/response filtering.
• Implement intelligent traffic shaping, load balancing, circuit breakers, automated provider failover, and semantic caching to optimize latency, resilience, and token consumption costs.
• Build and maintain declarative Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) configurations (YAML, Helm) and reusable GitLab CI/CD pipelines to support GitOps-driven gateway deployments.
• Instrument the gateway with OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing and performance metrics, routing structured audit logs into Splunk to establish success metrics for platform usage, latency, and control effectiveness.
• Leverage built-in Kong plugins, with the ability to engineer custom plugins (leveraging Go or Lua for low-latency data plane execution) when novel routing, context injection, or governance needs arise.

What you'll need

• 8+ years of professional engineering experience, with familiarity and experience in full-stack application development and enterprise architecture.
• Proven experience supporting and engineering enterprise-scale platforms handling high-volume traffic and complex multi-system integrations.
• Understanding of API gateway architecture, high-throughput traffic management, and secure-by-design operating models in a complex enterprise environment.
• Familiarity with various full-stack functionalities and proficiency in modern programming languages across backend or full-stack environments (e.g., Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go).
• Experience with AI systems and interfaces such as Claude, ChatGPT, or similar.
• Hands-on experience deploying and configuring containerized applications and services within Kubernetes environments.
• Experience building CI/CD automation pipelines and reusable templates using GitLab CI/CD (or equivalent tools), along with declarative infrastructure configurations (YAML, Helm).
• Technical understanding of RESTful APIs, JSON data structures, microservices architectures, and distributed systems design.
• Strong background in Identity and Access Management (IAM), including modern authentication/authorization protocols (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, mTLS) and identity platforms (Okta).
• Experience enterprise observability and executing monitoring and alerting based on defined platform health metrics (e.g. OpenTelemetry, Splunk).
• Experience with service reliability planning and optimized execution for disaster recovery.
• Experience working in Agile-based engineering teams, with the ability to self-start, operate autonomously, and deliver in a fast-paced environment focused on value-driven outcomes.
• Familiarity with enterprise service delivery and collaboration platforms (Jira, ServiceNow, Slack) for sprint execution, work tracking, incident workflows, and cross-team communication.
• Demonstrated ability to evaluate technical systems from both the service provider and consumer perspectives.
• Ability to partner effectively with security, risk, compliance, infrastructure, and product leaders on sensitive or high-governance API/AI initiatives.
• Proven experience utilizing AI technologies to enhance workflows, optimize processes, and accelerate execution.
• Proven experience with the delivery of enterprise platforms to enable user-driven experiences.

Nice to have

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field.
• Experience adopting and utilizing various development and scripting languages to deliver optimized build and peak execution performance (e.g., Go or Lua for low-latency gateway runtime extensions, TypeScript/Node.js or Python for MCP services and integration tooling).
• Experience designing and executing comprehensive volume, feasibility, and automated testing frameworks to validate system scalability, high-throughput traffic handling, and architectural viability under production-scale loads.
• Experience driving security vulnerability management and active remediation across client and backend applications, including automated package, dependency, and container image-based remediation to maintain compliance and secure the software supply chain.

Details

• Location: USA - Remote.
• Base salary range for U.S. candidates: $125,000 - $180,000 per year, with eligibility for bonuses, equity grants and a comprehensive benefits package.
• CrowdStrike participates in the E-Verify program.