Kong Platform and Migration Engineer

eTelligent Group LLC • Washington, DC

7h • Hybrid

About The Position

The Kong Platform and Migration Engineer will build and configure Kong on the IRS platform and migrate APIs to it in planned waves while preserving the systems that call them. The work is performed in a migration factory with IRS approval gates and two-week sprints, alongside an experienced lead platform engineer. The position is hybrid in the Washington, DC metro area, with work at IRS facilities and approved remote locations. U.S. citizenship is required, and the employee must be able to obtain and maintain an IRS Moderate Background Investigation (MBI)/Public Trust and meet IRS suitability and residency requirements.

Requirements

• At least 4 years of experience in API gateway, integration, or middleware engineering.
• Hands-on configuration experience with Kong or a comparable gateway such as webMethods API Gateway, Apigee, MuleSoft, or AWS API Gateway.
• Working knowledge of REST, HTTP, TLS and mTLS, OAuth2, OIDC, and JWT.
• Experience with Kubernetes or OpenShift and declarative configuration in Git.
• Comfort with Linux and shell scripting, plus experience with at least one of Python or Go.
• Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent experience.
• Ability to obtain and maintain an IRS Moderate Background Investigation (MBI); must meet IRS suitability and residency requirements.
• U.S. citizenship.

Nice To Haves

• Kong certification, CKA, or a cloud certification.
• IBM webMethods experience, especially API migration.
• An active IRS MBI or prior IRS work.
• Custom Kong plugin development in Lua or Go.

Responsibilities

• Configure Kong Gateway Enterprise control and data planes, Workspaces, RBAC, services, routes, and plugins on Red Hat OpenShift and cloud.
• Convert webMethods API definitions to Kong configuration using decK templates maintained in Git.
• Migrate simple APIs using templates and migrate medium APIs with consumer, ACL, and certificate setup grouped by provider.
• Help redesign complex APIs that use custom webMethods policies, prioritizing standard Kong plugins.
• Run functional equivalency tests by sending identical requests to webMethods and Kong versions and comparing status, headers, payload, authentication, and latency.
• Support dual-run cutovers with gradual traffic shifts and rehearse rollback for each migration wave.
• Apply IRS-approved security patterns for mTLS, OAuth2 client credentials, JWT, ACL, IP restriction, and rate limiting.
• Follow IRS change control procedures, including impact assessment, lower-environment testing, written rollback plans, and Change Advisory Board (CAB) approval.
• Write runbooks and migration records to support ongoing operations.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time