Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Overview

Staff Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) for Kong’s Professional Services team, delivering customer-facing implementations of Kong’s API and AI Connectivity solutions.

What you'll do

• Partner with enterprise customers to design, build, and implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments.
• Lead hands-on implementation for API gateways, AI gateways, service mesh, and related connectivity technologies.
• Build automation frameworks, migration tooling, custom integrations, and reusable accelerators.
• Drive 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 engineering teams to solve complex technical and operational challenges.
• Create reusable best practices, technical assets, reference architectures, documentation, and design patterns.

What you'll need

• 8+ years in customer-facing engineering, platform engineering, professional services, SRE, 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.
• Programming experience in Python, Go, Java, JavaScript, or Lua.

Details

• Location: Arizona, United States.