Senior Kong API Platform Engineer
- Location
- Across United Arab Emirates
- Salary
- Not specified
- Company
- Akash pawar
Job description
Role & Company / Project Overview: IT People Consulting is looking for an experienced Senior Kong API Platform Engineer to design, engineer, and operate Kong Gateway and Kong Konnect, ensuring secure, scalable, and reliable API connectivity across enterprise banking systems. The role serves as the secure API connectivity core of the Bank, translating complex business and technology requirements into enterprise-grade gateway architectures, reusable APIs, straight-through integration flows, governed Kong configurations, and maintainable supporting services. Key Responsibilities & Daily Duties: • Own Kong platform engineering and lifecycle management, including capacity, patching, upgrades, and production support. • Design, manage, and maintain Kong Gateway and Kong Konnect platforms at enterprise scale. • Develop secure, reusable APIs and straight-through integration flows across banking platforms, channels, payment platforms, and regulatory services. • Configure and govern core Kong components, services, routes, upstreams, plugins, certificates, and traffic policies. • Implement and enforce API security standards, including OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, mTLS, PKI, and OWASP API Security controls. • Automate API configurations, deployments, testing, and rollbacks using Git, CI/CD, decK, Kong APIs, and Terraform. • Apply API-first and contract-first practices using OpenAPI and AsyncAPI. • Ensure high availability, scalability, performance engineering, disaster recovery, and zero-downtime deployments. • Establish observability, monitoring, logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and lead incident response and root-cause analysis. • Maintain API documentation, architecture diagrams, operational runbooks, specifications, and Developer Portal content. • Collaborate with enterprise architecture, security, infrastructure, QA, risk, compliance, and business teams to establish API governance and engineering standards. • Lead solution and design reviews, code reviews, and release readiness. • Define and champion Kong engineering standards, API governance, and enterprise alignment. • Communicate designs, risks, and trade-offs clearly and coach teams across stakeholders. Required Qualifications, Skills & Experience: • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field. • Minimum 7 years of relevant experience in software engineering, API engineering, systems integration, or platform engineering. • At least 3 years of substantial hands-on experience with Kong Gateway or Kong Konnect. • Demonstrated ownership of enterprise Kong architecture, from design to operations and continuous improvement. • Proven experience in enterprise API architecture, secure API delivery, platform operations, and production support. • Proven delivery of Kong configurations, secure APIs, automation, and integrations. • Strong programming skills in JavaScript, Go, or Python; Lua experience is beneficial. • Solid knowledge of REST APIs, OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, Docker, Kubernetes, Linux, cloud platforms, and CI/CD. • Strong understanding of high availability, observability, performance engineering, and disaster recovery. Preferred Skills: • Experience in banking, payments, or regulated financial services is highly preferred. • Current Kong Gateway or Kong Konnect certification is preferred. • Cloud or Kubernetes certifications are advantageous. • Familiarity with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, SQL, Redis, and Kafka or MQ. Working Hours, Shifts & Location Details: • Location: UAE (Department: IT). Application Instructions: • Interested candidates should submit their CV for review.