KONG DEVELOPER

Overview:
Seeking an experienced Kong API Gateway Engineer to support security patching, troubleshooting, performance testing, platform optimization, and new development for an enterprise API gateway environment.

Key Responsibilities:

• Manage and support Kong Gateway / Kong Konnect environments.
• Implement security patches, configuration changes, and platform enhancements.
• Troubleshoot issues across Kong upstream services , including production incidents.
• Develop and execute functional, integration, load, and performance tests .
• Develop/customize Kong plugins and configurations , including Lua when needed.
• Manage gateway configurations using decK, DB-less Kong, YAML , and CI/CD.
• Support containerized Kong deployments using Docker and AWS ECS .
• Implement and troubleshoot routing, TLS, DNS, authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and mTLS .
• Use Splunk, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry , and other observability tools for debugging and tracing.
• Maintain documentation and standardized gateway patterns.

Must-Have Skills:

• Strong hands-on Kong Gateway / Kong Konnect experience.
• AWS ECS and Docker experience.
• API Gateway, REST APIs, microservices, and API security expertise.
• Strong troubleshooting/debugging and production support experience.
• CI/CD, configuration management, and automated testing .
• Experience with performance/load testing .
• Splunk experience.
• Knowledge of OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, mTLS, rate limiting , and security controls.
• Strong networking fundamentals: DNS, TLS, routing, load balancing .

Nice to Have:

• Lua / custom Kong plugin development
• OpenResty/Nginx
• PACT/API contract testing
• Chaos/resiliency testing
• CloudFormation/IaC
• Honeycomb/OpenTelemetry
• Previous experience working in enterprise external API gateway environments