Forward Deployed Engineer AI Gateway EMEA

About the role

If you don't think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we're looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others.

You'll make our customers' first strategic AI use case work securely, in production, in their real environment. Not a demo. Not a proof-of-concept that quietly dies. Real traffic, real identity, real policy.

As a Forward-Deployed Engineer in EMEA, you'll sit with platform, security and engineering teams at some of the region's most important enterprises, and own the technical path from first discovery call to a workload that's actually running. You're a builder with enterprise architecture instincts, credible with staff engineers and security architects, and comfortable owning ambiguity across APIs, AI Gateway, agents, MCP, identity and policy.

This is not a demo-only SE role, and it's not a ticket-based implementation consultancy. You own technical success for strategic AI opportunities end to end, then take what you learn back into Kong's own engineering team to make the next deal faster.

What you'll do

• Lead AI, API and agentic technical discovery with customer platform, security and engineering teams.

• Design runtime architecture across models, APIs, MCP and tool access, identity and policy.

• Build prototypes, integrations, evaluation flows and reference implementations that prove Kong governs real production traffic.

• Remove blockers in pilot and production: auth, network, observability, latency and cost.

• Own the technical path from pilot to paid, and stay on it until the workload is running.

• Turn what you build into reusable patterns, so the next AI Gateway deal is faster and cheaper to win.

• Spend regular time embedded with Kong's internal engineering team, pairing on AI Gateway and agentic roadmap work.

• Feed field patterns and roadmap-critical requirements straight back to Product, before competitors define the narrative.

• Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering and Customer Success across EMEA on strategic AI opportunities.

What you'll bring

• Strong hands-on engineering background, with experience building and shipping production software (Go, Python, TypeScript or similar).

• Experience in a customer-facing technical role such as forward-deployed, solutions architecture, staff or principal engineering, or technical consulting.

• Enterprise architecture instincts: you can design for identity, network, security and observability constraints in complex environments.

• Working knowledge of LLM and agentic patterns: model APIs, tool calling, MCP, evaluation and cost and latency trade-offs.

• Experience with API gateways or infrastructure: Kubernetes, service mesh, OAuth/OIDC, mTLS, policy enforcement.

• Credibility with staff engineers and security architects. You can lead a technical discussion from whiteboard to working code.

• You own outcomes, not tickets. You're comfortable with ambiguity and drive work to done.

• Strong written and verbal communication in English; additional European languages are a plus.

• Willingness to travel to customer sites across EMEA as needed.

Bonus points

• Prior experience at an AI-native, developer-platform or infrastructure company.

• Experience with Kong Gateway, Konnect or other API management platforms.

• Open source contributions, or a track record of publishing reference architectures or patterns.