Description :

Job Description - Kong API Gateway Support Engineer

We are looking for a highly skilled and proactive Kong API Gateway Support Engineer to manage, support, and optimize our Kong API Gateway platform. The ideal candidate will be responsible for ensuring the stability, security, scalability, and smooth day-to-day operations of the Kong environment. This role requires strong expertise in Kong Gateway administration, production support, troubleshooting, customization, and API security management.

The candidate will work closely with infrastructure, DevOps, developers, and business stakeholders to support enterprise API integrations and enhance the overall API management ecosystem.

Key Responsibilities :

Kong Gateway Administration & Support :

- Provide L2/L3 production support for Kong API Gateway by resolving incidents, service disruptions, configuration issues, and performance bottlenecks.

- Perform Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for recurring issues and implement preventive solutions.

- Ensure maximum uptime, reliability, and availability of Kong Gateway services.

Installation, Configuration & Maintenance :

- Install, configure, upgrade, patch, and maintain Kong Gateway components across environments such as Development, QA, UAT, and Production.

- Manage Kong control plane and data plane configurations.

- Perform health checks, backups, disaster recovery planning, and platform maintenance.

Custom Plugin Development :

- Design, develop, test, and deploy custom Kong plugins based on business or security requirements.

- Enhance existing plugins for performance, logging, routing, transformation, authentication, or monitoring needs.

- Work with Lua scripting and Kong plugin architecture.

Developer Portal Management :

- Manage and customize the Kong Developer Portal.

- Implement branding, UI enhancements, access workflows, and developer onboarding improvements.

- Integrate the portal with identity systems, APIs, and external tools where required.

Monitoring & Performance Optimization :

- Continuously monitor gateway health, API traffic, latency, throughput, logs, and alerts.

- Tune configurations to improve gateway performance and scalability.

- Use monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Splunk, etc.

API Security & Governance :

- Implement and maintain API security policies such as :

1. Authentication (OAuth2, JWT, Basic Auth, Key Auth)

2. Authorization

3. Rate Limiting

4. IP Restrictions

5. TLS/SSL Certificates

6. Traffic Control Policies

- Ensure APIs comply with enterprise security standards.

CI/CD & DevOps Collaboration :

- Work with DevOps teams to support automated deployments through CI/CD pipelines.

- Participate in release management, deployment validations, rollback planning, and automation initiatives.

- Support Infrastructure as Code and containerized deployments where applicable.

Documentation & Best Practices :

- Prepare and maintain :

1. Technical documents

2. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

3. Runbooks

4. Troubleshooting guides

5. Architecture diagrams

- Recommend best practices for Kong platform governance and support.

Required Skills & Qualifications :

- 3+ years of hands-on experience in Kong API Gateway administration, configuration, and support.

- Strong knowledge of Kong Gateway architecture, services, routes, consumers, plugins, upstreams, targets, and policies.

- Expertise in Lua programming for custom plugin development.

- Experience managing and customizing the Kong Developer Portal.

- Strong troubleshooting skills in production environments.

- Good understanding of REST APIs, JSON, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS, Certificates, and Web Services.

- Knowledge of authentication mechanisms such as OAuth2, JWT, LDAP, SSO, SAML, etc.

- Experience with Linux/Unix administration.

- Familiarity with CI/CD tools like Jenkins, GitLab, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, etc.

- Experience with Docker/Kubernetes/OpenShift is an added advantage.

- Knowledge of logging and monitoring tools like Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, etc.

Preferred Skills :

- Experience with hybrid or cloud Kong deployments.

- Exposure to enterprise API management ecosystems.

- Scripting knowledge in Shell, Python, or Bash.

- Understanding of networking concepts such as DNS, Load Balancers, Reverse Proxy, Firewall, SSL.