• Provide Kong platform engineering expertise • Administer Kong (routes, services, consumers, upstreams, certificates, rate limiting, logging) • Design, implement, and maintain Kong plugins (custom or extended), including policy enforcement and transformations • Operate Kong in Kubernetes (Helm/operator patterns as applicable), upgrades, config promotion across environments • Provide API design & contract management expertise • Define API standards and review APIs for consistency, usability, and backward compatibility • Author and maintain OpenAPI Specification (OAS) contracts; implement versioning and deprecation practices • Enable hosting and lifecycle workflows for OpenAPI docs/specs (publishing, validation, governance checks) • Provide Security & authentication expertise • Implement/maintain authN/authZ patterns: JSON Web Tokens (JWT) issuance/validation/claims mapping, token modification, key rotation • Integrate with directory/identity services (e.g., Active Directory (AD) / LDAP-style patterns) and common gateway security controls • Provide Cloud + DevOps / platform expertise • Experience Building Kubernetes resources (Deployments, Services, Ingress/Gateway API objects as relevant, ConfigMaps/Secrets, NetworkPolicies) • Provision and manage Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources needed for the platform (networking, compute, load balancing, DNS, certificates, secrets) • Implement DevOps processes: CI/CD, GitOps patterns, automated testing/validation of configs/specs, environment promotion, rollback • Experience with Observability, metering, and reporting • Implement API metering/usage analytics, dashboards, and operational reporting (SLIs/SLOs, error rates, latency, top consumers/routes) • Instrument logs/metrics/traces; build actionable dashboards and extract periodic reports for stakeholders • Systems administration (practical ops) • Troubleshoot Linux/container runtime issues; manage certs, TLS, networking, DNS, and performance tuning • Participate in on-call/escalations as needed; produce runbooks and operational documentation