8 days ago
United Kingdom (city not specified)Senior
Responsibilities
- Lead AI, API, and agentic technical discovery with customer platform, security, and engineering teams.
- Design runtime architecture across models, APIs, MCP, tool access, identity, and policy.
- Build prototypes, integrations, evaluation flows, and reference implementations for production AI Gateway traffic.
- Remove authentication, network, observability, latency, and cost blockers during pilots and production deployments.
- Own the technical path from pilot to paid deployment until the workload is running.
- Create reusable implementation patterns and feed field requirements into Kong Product and Engineering teams.
- Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering, and Customer Success on strategic AI opportunities across EMEA.
Requirements
- Strong hands-on engineering background building and shipping production software using Go, Python, TypeScript, or similar.
- Experience in a customer-facing technical role such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Architect, Staff or Principal Engineer, or technical consultant.
- Ability to design for identity, network, security, and observability constraints in complex enterprise environments.
- Working knowledge of LLM and agentic patterns, including model APIs, tool calling, MCP, evaluation, and cost and latency trade-offs.
- Experience with API gateways or infrastructure, including Kubernetes, service mesh, OAuth/OIDC, mTLS, and policy enforcement.
- Ability to lead technical discussions from whiteboard concepts through working code and communicate credibly with staff engineers and security architects.
- Strong written and verbal English communication skills; additional European languages are a plus.
- Prior experience at an AI-native, developer-platform, or infrastructure company, Kong Gateway, Konnect, other API management platforms, open source contributions, or published reference architectures are advantageous.
- Willingness to travel to customer sites across EMEA as needed.
Benefits
- Regular collaboration and pairing with Kong’s internal engineering team on AI Gateway and agentic roadmap work.
- Travel to customer sites across EMEA as needed.
Tech Stack
Categories
Forward Deployed
About Kong
Kong builds an open-source and commercial platform for API and AI connectivity, including Kong Gateway, Kong Konnect, and service mesh tools (Kuma/Kong Mesh) to secure, manage, and observe APIs and LLM traffic across clouds. It sells subscriptions and cloud services for API lifecycle management, security, and traffic governance to enterprises and platform teams. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Francisco, Kong is privately held.