Kong API Gateway Engineer

• Own Kong platform engineering and lifecycle management, and work with infrastructure, security, network, database, and operations teams to deliver capacity, patching, certificate management, disaster recovery, upgrades, and production support under clearly defined operational ownership and escalation procedures. • Design secure, reusable APIs and straight-through integration flows connecting banking platforms, channels, payments, regulatory services, partners, databases, and messaging ecosystems. • Configure and govern services, routes, upstreams, targets, consumers, certificates, control planes, plugin policies, load balancing, health checks, retries, timeouts, and rate limits. • Prioritize Kong-supported capabilities and plugins for security, traffic control, transformation, routing, and observability. Keep complex business orchestration and domain validation in maintainable supporting services, using Lua custom plugins only for justified gateway-specific extensions where supported Kong capabilities do not meet the requirement. • Translate functional and non-functional requirements into API contracts, service boundaries, orchestration patterns, reusable components, and resilient transaction flows; evaluate alternatives, dependencies, failure modes, and enterprise-wide trade-offs. • Apply API-first and contract-first practices using OpenAPI for synchronous APIs and AsyncAPI for event-driven interfaces, with versioning, backward compatibility, idempotency, correlation identifiers, and canonical error models. • Enforce OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, mTLS, PKI, certificate and secrets management, least privilege, threat protection, OWASP API Security controls, auditability, and data protection. • Automate configuration, testing, promotion and rollback control using Git, CI/CD, Kong APIs, Terraform, or equivalent tooling. • Engineer high availability, horizontal scalability, low latency, zero-downtime change, disaster recovery, and controlled failure across control-plane and data-plane components. • Establish structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, alerts, correlation, and agreed SLI/SLO monitoring. Lead or coordinate incident response, root-cause analysis, tuning, patching, and safe upgrades, with measurable objectives for platform availability, latency, error rates, recovery, configuration compliance, and operational readiness. • Own unit, contract, integration, regression, performance, resilience, security, and upgrade-compatibility testing. • Maintain architecture diagrams, API specifications, configuration records, deployment guides, runbooks, support procedures, and Kong Developer Portal content, including authentication guidance, examples, onboarding, versioning, and release notes. Kong Gateway OR Kong Konnect OR Kong API