Kong AI Gateway Engineer

LPL Financial•Charlotte, TX

About The Position

Build a career that matches all your initiative with an impressive dose of innovation. From cutting‑edge resources and a collaborative environment to the freedom to make an impact and more, you’ll find the ingredients you need at LPL Financial to shape your success while helping clients pursue their financial goals. Join us in building the AI integration foundation for the enterprise. This role offers the opportunity to work at the intersection of software engineering, API gateways, and AI/LLM enablement—helping teams across the organization securely and reliably route AI and MCP traffic at scale. As a Senior Engineer on the Middleware team, you will play a key role in evolving our Kong AI Gateway platform, supporting enterprise adoption of AI capabilities, and enabling development teams through well-designed patterns, tooling, and documentation. The Middleware team is responsible for the operational reliability, extensibility, and evolution of the Kong AI Gateway platform. This Senior Engineer role is an individual contributor position focused on designing, building, and maintaining gateway capabilities that support AI/LLM integrations across the enterprise. You will collaborate closely with Product and Technology partners, contribute hands-on engineering work, and help define reusable solutions that make AI integrations easier, safer, and more scalable for internal teams.

Requirements

6+ years of relevant software development experience
2+ years experience implementing Kong API Gateway and/or AI Gateway solutions in enterprise environments
6+ years experience with APIs, containers, and microservices architectures
6+ years experience with application development using multiple programming languages
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Nice To Haves

Experience with Google Apigee, IBM API Connect, or IBM DataPower
Experience supporting shared platforms used by multiple development teams
Familiarity with enterprise security, governance, and compliance considerations for API platforms
Systems thinking and platform-oriented design
Clear technical communication across engineering and non-engineering audiences
Problem-solving mindset with a focus on scalable solutions
Continuous learning and adaptability in evolving AI and platform ecosystems

Responsibilities

Collaborate with Product and Technology teams to maximize the value delivered by the Kong AI Gateway platform
Build, enhance, and maintain Kong gateway capabilities supporting MCP and LLM traffic
Design and develop Kong plugins for authentication, rate limiting (including token-based throttling), logging, and request/response transformation
Develop internal tools and solutions that improve how teams integrate AI capabilities across the organization
Maintain platform health through upgrades, configuration management, and operational best practices
Write and maintain technical documentation and knowledge base articles to support platform adoption and usage
Contribute to reusable patterns and reference implementations that enable consistent onboarding across teams