Team Fit- Growth mindset with an "if I don't know it, I can learn it" attitude.
- Experience working in Agile and "you build it, you run it" environments.
- Strong client communication and collaboration skills.
- Self-directed, thorough in testing and validation, and comfortable balancing production support with new development work.
- Empathy for both API producers and consumers.
Core Responsibilities- Evaluate changes for impact and risk, implement safely, and validate thoroughly.
- Build, test, deploy, and support Kong Gateway configurations, plugins, integrations, and new capabilities.
- Troubleshoot production issues and trace requests across the full stack from gateway to upstream services.
- Conduct performance, load, resiliency, and API testing.
- Apply security patches, implement security controls, and support incident response.
- Maintain documentation, configuration governance, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment standards.
Technical ExpertiseAPI Gateway & Kong- Deep experience with Kong Gateway/Konnect, including services, routes, consumers, plugins, declarative configuration (decK), DB-less mode, Admin API, Control Plane/Data Plane architecture, and custom plugin development.
- Strong understanding of API gateway patterns, request/response lifecycles, traffic management, service abstraction, ingress/egress routing, and upstream/downstream services.
- Knowledge of Kong plugin execution, lifecycle management, standardization, and configuration governance.
Core Technology Stack- Experience across networking, security, gateway, and delivery layers, including DNS, TLS, load balancing, authentication, authorization, rate limiting, routing, CI/CD, and configuration management.
- Strong experience with Docker, AWS ECS, containerized environments, infrastructure provisioning, horizontal scaling, secrets management, and platform operations.
- Familiarity with CloudFormation, infrastructure-as-code, high availability, resiliency patterns, failover strategies, and multi-region deployments.
Development & APIs- Proficiency in Java, Python, Node.js, TypeScript, or similar languages; Lua preferred.
- Strong understanding of REST APIs, OpenAPI/Swagger, API versioning, contract testing, microservices architecture, and YAML-based configuration.
- Experience developing and supporting API integrations for internal and external consumers.
Testing & Quality- Experience with performance, load, contract, resiliency, and automated testing.
- Strong knowledge of TDD/BDD methodologies, API testing practices, and validation frameworks.
- Experience with chaos engineering and large-scale configuration testing preferred.
Observability & Operations- Expertise tracing requests across distributed systems and distinguishing gateway versus backend issues.
- Experience using Splunk, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry, logging, telemetry, metrics analysis, alerting, incident response, and performance troubleshooting.
Security- Proven experience applying security patches and managing production security controls.
- Strong understanding of OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWT, mTLS, threat protection, authorization models, rate limiting, vulnerability remediation, and DevSecOps practices.
- Ability to quickly learn enterprise security platforms and authentication frameworks.
Additional Preferred Experience- API lifecycle management, governance, onboarding, policy enforcement, and standardized gateway patterns.
- External partner integrations, vendor connectivity, hybrid-cloud routing, and enterprise boundary security.
- Developer enablement, onboarding support, documentation, templates, and best-practice implementation.
Special FactorsSponsorshipVanguard is not offering visa sponsorship for this position.
