kong - Forward Deployed Engineer AI Gateway EMEA
Requirements
• Strong hands-on engineering background, with experience building and shipping production software (Go, Python, TypeScript or similar). • Experience in a customer-facing technical role such as forward-deployed, solutions architecture, staff or principal engineering, or technical consulting. • Enterprise architecture instincts: you can design for identity, network, security and observability constraints in complex environments. • Working knowledge of LLM and agentic patterns: model APIs, tool calling, MCP, evaluation and cost and latency trade-offs. • Experience with API gateways or infrastructure: Kubernetes, service mesh, OAuth/OIDC, mTLS, policy enforcement. • Credibility with staff engineers and security architects. You can lead a technical discussion from whiteboard to working code. • You own outcomes, not tickets. You're comfortable with ambiguity and drive work to done. • Strong written and verbal communication in English; additional European languages are a plus. • Willingness to travel to customer sites across EMEA as needed. • Prior experience at an AI-native, developer-platform or infrastructure company. • Experience with Kong Gateway, Konnect or other API management platforms. • Open source contributions, or a track record of publishing reference architectures or patterns.
Responsibilities
• Lead AI, API and agentic technical discovery with customer platform, security and engineering teams. • Design runtime architecture across models, APIs, MCP and tool access, identity and policy. • Build prototypes, integrations, evaluation flows and reference implementations that prove Kong governs real production traffic. • Remove blockers in pilot and production: auth, network, observability, latency and cost. • Own the technical path from pilot to paid, and stay on it until the workload is running. • Turn what you build into reusable patterns, so the next AI Gateway deal is faster and cheaper to win. • Spend regular time embedded with Kong's internal engineering team, pairing on AI Gateway and agentic roadmap work. • Feed field patterns and roadmap-critical requirements straight back to Product, before competitors define the narrative. • Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering and Customer Success across EMEA on strategic AI opportunities.
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