Austin-based SDVOSB delivering application development, cybersecurity, instructional design and training to DOD and VA.
API Developer Lead
Location
United States
Posted
8 days ago
Salary
Not specified
No structured requirement data.
Job Description
Role Description
The VA Lighthouse Program is transforming how Veterans, partners, and internal teams access critical VA data through secure, scalable APIs. The program AI & Engineering team is seeking a fully remote API Developer Lead to support this mission across multiple teams. This is a temp‑to‑hire role, with conversion eligibility based on client requirements.
- Administer and optimize Kong Gateway (routes, services, plugins, certificates, rate limiting, logging).
- Build and extend Kong plugins and manage Kong in Kubernetes (Helm/operator patterns, upgrades, config promotion).
- Define API standards, review API designs, and manage OpenAPI (OAS) contracts, versioning, and governance.
- Implement authentication and security patterns (JWT, claims mapping, key rotation, AD/LDAP integration).
- Build and operate Kubernetes resources; manage AWS networking, compute, load balancing, DNS, and secrets.
- Implement CI/CD and GitOps workflows, automated validation, and environment promotion.
- Deliver observability: API metering, dashboards, logs/metrics/traces, SLO reporting.
- Troubleshoot Linux/container issues and support on‑call operations with runbooks and documentation.
Qualifications
- Production experience administering Kong Gateway.
- Experience building/extending Kong plugins and deep gateway policy knowledge.
- Strong API design background and expert-level OpenAPI skills.
- API governance (linting, validation, contract testing, semantic versioning).
- Kubernetes deployment and troubleshooting.
- DevOps practices (GitOps, CI/CD, automation).
- Authentication expertise with JWT and enterprise identity systems.
Preferred Qualifications
- AWS platform experience.
- Operating Kong at scale (multi-team, multi-tenant), performance tuning, migrations.
- GitOps tools (Argo CD, Flux).
- Service mesh/gateway ecosystem familiarity (Envoy, NGINX, Istio).
- Observability stacks (Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch).
- Security practices (TLS/mTLS, secrets management, OWASP API security).
- Experience mentoring teams and setting platform standards.
Job Requirements
- Production experience administering Kong Gateway.
- Experience building/extending Kong plugins and deep gateway policy knowledge.
- Strong API design background and expert-level OpenAPI skills.
- API governance (linting, validation, contract testing, semantic versioning).
- Kubernetes deployment and troubleshooting.
- DevOps practices (GitOps, CI/CD, automation).
- Authentication expertise with JWT and enterprise identity systems.
- Preferred Qualifications
- AWS platform experience.
- Operating Kong at scale (multi-team, multi-tenant), performance tuning, migrations.
- GitOps tools (Argo CD, Flux).
- Service mesh/gateway ecosystem familiarity (Envoy, NGINX, Istio).
- Observability stacks (Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch).
- Security practices (TLS/mTLS, secrets management, OWASP API security).
- Experience mentoring teams and setting platform standards.
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