Platform Engineer - Application Networking

Responsibilities

• Compose, develop, and maintain common application routing frameworks that facilitate communication spanning client requests to service responses as well as between services.
• Develop and improve routing capabilities through the Kong ecosystem, including Kong API Gateway, Kong Ingress Controller, and Kong Konnect.
• Enable safe traffic management approaches that support scalability, resilience, and controlled change.
• Deploy and manage container-based routing and networking components on Kubernetes.
• Support east–west service connectivity within and across clusters, including service mesh-based solutions.
• Partner with Kubernetes platform teams to ensure routing infrastructure is reliable, scalable, and operable.
• Increase the reliability, performance, and observability of application routing platforms.
• Integrate routing platforms into CI/CD and GitOps workflows.
• Provide clear conventions, automation, and documentation to enable application teams to adopt the platform effectively.

Requirements

• Strong background in networking and distributed systems, particularly client/server communication models.
• Hands-on experience operating application gateways, proxies, or traffic management platforms.
• Experience managing Kubernetes-based systems in production environments.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Solid understanding of: HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, gRPC, TCP and UDP traffic patterns, TCP and UDP traffic patterns.
• Experience with L4/L7 routing concepts, load balancing, and traffic policy.
• Proven experience integrating Kong to provide enterprise middleware application routing implementations.
• Familiarity with DNS-based service discovery and naming strategies.
• Comfort working alongside infrastructure primitives such as networks, load balancers, and firewalls.

Skills & Knowledge

• Experience supporting globally distributed systems across regions, providers, and environments.
• Knowledge of gateway architectures, service mesh concepts, and internal service connectivity.
• Familiarity with modern platform practices: GitOps or equivalent experience, Infrastructure as Code, Automated policy enforcement.
• Knowledge of fundamental networking technologies such as BGP, eBPF, or overlay networking (an advantage).

Additional Attributes

• Strong communicator who can collaborate effectively across architecture, platform, and application teams.
• Comfortable working with distributed teams across multiple time zones.
• Product-minded, with a focus on developer experience, platform reliability, and adoption.
• Self-starter with a strong sense of ownership and a bias toward documentation and knowledge sharing.
• Experience contributing to or collaborating on open-source software (a plus).

Pay

The estimated base pay range for this role is $150,100—$225,100 USD.