Api Platform Engineer, Kong Api & Ai Gateway

The role suits an experienced engineer who already handles production topics independently and wants to broaden technical ownership. Direct Kong experience is welcome. Experience with another API gateway is equally relevant. What You’ll Build First: Turn Kong AI Gateway into a production-ready service that gives application teams a secure, observable and self-service path to LLM and MCP connectivity. Build the guardrails for policy enforcement, traffic routing, rate limiting, auditability and reliable operations. What You Will Do

• Operate and continuously improve our business-critical Kong API Gateway across OpenSnd Microsoft Azure, including incidents, changes, upgrades, security, capacity and lifecycle management.
• Design and build automation and self-service capabilities that make API onboarding, policy delivery and platform changes safer, faster and more consistent.
• Develop platform services and tooling using APIs, GitOps, CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code.
• Establish actionable observability across metrics, logs and traces using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana and the Elastic Stack, and strengthen API security through policies, certificates, secrets and modern identity standards.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues, perform root-cause analysis and turn operational learnings into durable platform improvements.
• Share on-call responsibility for the platform and use incidents to eliminate recurring operational toil.

• You do not need experience with every tool listed below. We are looking for solid production judgment, curiosity and the ability to take ownership.
• Hands-on experience operating an API gateway in a production environment.
• Strong production experience with Kubernetes or OpenShift and Microsoft Azure and services such as AKS and Entra ID.
• Proven automation skills using GitOps, CI/CD and infrastructure or configuration as code, with tools such as Terraform, Helm, Argo CD or GitLab CI.
• Software engineering or scripting experience. Go for Terraform integrations or Java and Spring Boot for self-service platform development is advantageous.
• Solid knowledge of networking, TLS, certificates, secrets and identity standards such as OAuth and OIDC.
• Experience with observability, incident response and root-cause analysis in business-critical, regulated environments. Knowledge of OpenTelemetry is a plus.