Kong
Forward Deployed Engineer
$192K–$274K
Arizona, United States · Remote · Full-time · Posted Sep 16, 2026
- Experience
- 8+ years in customer-facing engineering, platform engineering, professional services, site reliability engineering, or software engineering roles.
About the job
Implements and modernizes enterprise API and AI connectivity solutions using Kong, including customer deployments, migrations, and reusable engineering tools.
What you'll do
- Design and implement Kong solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments, including API gateways, AI gateways, service mesh, and developer portals.
- Build production code, automation, integrations, and migration tooling for customer modernization and adoption initiatives.
- Collaborate with customer teams and Kong product and engineering groups to solve technical challenges and share implementation feedback.
What they ask for
- 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 with automation, CI/CD or migration tooling; Linux, networking, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps practices; major cloud providers; and programming in a language such as Python, Go, Java, JavaScript, or Lua.
Nice to have
- Prior experience at an API Management, Open Source, Middleware, SaaS, or Infrastructure software company.
- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and automation tooling such as Terraform, Helm, Ansible, or GitOps frameworks.
Pay
$192,010 – $274,300 (base salary)
Tools
Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, Python, Go, Java, Terraform
AI focus
Supports enterprise AI connectivity initiatives, including AI gateways, governance, and adoption through Kong’s connectivity platform.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative