Key Responsibilities:

Gateway Architecture & Core Engineering:

- Architectural Ownership: Take complete ownership of the end-to-end design, configuration, deployment, and operational resilience of the Bifrost Gateway.

- Traffic Management: Design and implement intelligent routing, rate-limiting, load balancing, failover strategies, and edge-traffic optimization for high-throughput environments.

- AI & Virtual Key Management: Architect, issue, and lifecycle-manage virtual keys to provide fine-grained access control, tracking, and quota enforcement for client applications and AI agents.

- Sovereign Cloud & Orchestration Integration: Design and enforce strict mTLS (Mutual TLS) connectivity models across the orchestration layer and sovereign cloud infrastructure to guarantee dynamic data sovereignty and privacy.

Security, Compliance & Platform Contracts:

- Zero-Trust Security: Drive core gateway security decisions covering authentication, authorization, token translation, dynamic policy enforcement, and DDoS mitigation.

- Contract Definition: Define, standardize, and maintain robust API and integration contracts in close collaboration with core platform engineering teams.

- Audit & Observability: Establish audit logging, distributed tracing, and telemetry metrics to maintain full visibility across sovereign cloud boundary crossings.

Technical Leadership & Escalation:

- Engineering Guidance: Provide architectural leadership and mentorship to cross-functional engineering teams working on integration, platform infrastructure, and security.

- Troubleshooting & Resolution: Act as the top-tier technical escalation point to diagnose and resolve complex network, mTLS handshake, routing, and platform integration bottlenecks.

- Scalability & Reliability: Continuously evaluate gateway topologies to ensure high availability, ultra-low latency, and seamless horizontal scaling under peak loads.

Required Skills & Qualifications:

- Experience: 10 - 11 years in enterprise infrastructure, cloud engineering, or API gateway architecture in large-scale distributed environments.

- Gateway & Routing Mastery: Proven expertise architecting high-performance API gateways/proxies (e.g., Bifrost, Envoy, Kong, Apigee, or custom edge-routing platforms).

- AI & Virtual Keys: Practical experience implementing virtual key/API key patterns, context propagation, and authorization models specifically tailored for AI agents and LLM orchestration layers.

- Sovereign Cloud & mTLS: Expertise in PKI infrastructure, mTLS certificate management, SPIFFE/SPIRE, and network security policies within sovereign, multi-cloud, or air-gapped environments.

- Platform Contracts: Deep understanding of OpenAPI, gRPC, Protobuf, RESTful patterns, and event-driven architecture contracts.

- Network & Security Standards: In-depth knowledge of OAuth2, OIDC, JWT, SAML, TLS 1.3, rate-limiting algorithms, and web application firewall (WAF) strategies.

- Problem Solving: Advanced diagnostic skills using packet analysis, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger), and observability tools (Prometheus, Datadog).

Preferred Qualifications:

- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, service mesh architectures (Istio, Linkerd), and cloud-native network stacks.

- Familiarity with sovereign cloud regulatory frameworks, data residency requirements, and strict compliance environments.

- Track record of driving cross-team alignment between security, platform, and application engineering teams.