Kong Administrator / AI Gateway Engineer

100% Remote | 6+ Months Contract | 7 12 Years Experience About The Role We're looking for a hands-on Kong Administrator who can run and grow an enterprise API platform and extend it into an AI/LLM gateway. You'll manage Kong Gateway and Konnect, secure and route traffic to OpenAI and Azure OpenAI models, and keep the platform reliable on Kubernetes in the cloud. What you'll do Install, configure, upgrade and administer Kong Gateway and Kong Konnect across environments Design and manage APIs, routes, services, plugins, consumers and rate limits Build and run an AI/LLM gateway on Kong, routing and governing traffic to OpenAI, Azure OpenAI and other models Put API security in place, including OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, mTLS, API keys, and policy enforcement Deploy and operate Kong on Kubernetes (Kong Ingress Controller, Helm) in AWS, Azure or GCP Set up monitoring, logging and alerting for the API and AI traffic, and troubleshoot performance issues Work with app, security and platform teams to onboard APIs and AI use cases Write runbooks, standards and automation (CI/CD, decK, Terraform) Must have 7 12 years in IT, with 3 5+ years of hands-on Kong administration Strong experience with Kong Gateway and Kong Konnect API management experience, covering design, lifecycle, versioning and governance AI/LLM gateway experience with OpenAI and/or Azure OpenAI API security, including OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, mTLS and rate limiting Kubernetes experience Cloud experience in AWS, Azure or GCP Nice to have Multi-LLM integration and model routing AI guardrails, such as prompt and response filtering, PII redaction, and content safety LLM observability, including token usage, latency, cost tracking and tracing Kong AI plugins (AI Proxy, AI Prompt Guard, AI Rate Limiting) Terraform, decK, Helm, and GitOps/CI/CD Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog or Splunk