Kong Middleware Engineer or Kong Lead

Job Title: Sr. Kong Middleware Engineer or Kong Lead

Location: Austin, TX

Role Summary

We are looking for a Sr. Kong Middleware Engineer or Kong Lead with strong hands-on experience around API Services implementation and providing Best Practices solutions in Kong platform. 

Key Responsibilities

·        Design and implement APIs using Kong Gateway (services, routes, upstreams, plugins).

·        Provide best design patterns, security patterns and testing patterns in Kong platform.

·        Implement API security patterns including OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, mTLS, rate limiting, and traffic controls.

·        Deploy and operate Kong and APIs on AWS (EKS/ECS/EC2, ALB/NLB, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch).

·        Implement CI/CD pipelines for Kong configurations services.

·        Put guardrails around API deployment to higher environment using best practices in Kong.

·        Recommend Kong plugins

·        Enable monitoring, logging, and operational support for APIs and gateway components.

·        Collaborate with architects, SRE/operations, and security teams in an onsite delivery model.

Required Qualifications

·        8+ years of software development experience with strong API/backend focus.

·        2+ years of Kong API Gateway experience in leading the implementation.

·        Native Kong plugin development experience using Lua/OpenResty is a plus.

·        Experience integrating with .NET / C# applications with Kong platform.

·        Solid understanding of API security, governance, and performance best practices.

·        Experience deploying Kong containers and nodes on AWS cloud.

·        Experience with Docker, Kubernetes (EKS preferred), Git, and CI/CD pipelines.

·        Strong communication and collaboration skills.

Core Skills

Kong Gateway | Lua/OpenResty | AWS | API Security | CI/CD | API Design Patterns