Platform Engineer, Specialist

Vanguard • Malvern, PA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

This role focuses on evaluating changes for impact and risk, implementing them safely, and validating them thoroughly. The Platform Engineer will be responsible for building, testing, deploying, and supporting Kong Gateway configurations, plugins, integrations, and new capabilities. This includes troubleshooting production issues, tracing requests across the full stack, conducting various types of API testing, applying security patches, implementing security controls, and supporting incident response. Additionally, the role involves maintaining documentation, configuration governance, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment standards.

Requirements

• Deep experience with Kong Gateway/Konnect, including services, routes, consumers, plugins, declarative configuration (decK), DB-less mode, Admin API, Control Plane/Data Plane architecture, and custom plugin development.
• Strong understanding of API gateway patterns, request/response lifecycles, traffic management, service abstraction, ingress/egress routing, and upstream/downstream services.
• Knowledge of Kong plugin execution, lifecycle management, standardization, and configuration governance.
• Experience across networking, security, gateway, and delivery layers, including DNS, TLS, load balancing, authentication, authorization, rate limiting, routing, CI/CD, and configuration management.
• Strong experience with Docker, AWS ECS, containerized environments, infrastructure provisioning, horizontal scaling, secrets management, and platform operations.
• Familiarity with CloudFormation, infrastructure-as-code, high availability, resiliency patterns, failover strategies, and multi-region deployments.
• Proficiency in Java, Python, Node.js, TypeScript, or similar languages; Lua preferred.
• Strong understanding of REST APIs, OpenAPI/Swagger, API versioning, contract testing, microservices architecture, and YAML-based configuration.
• Experience developing and supporting API integrations for internal and external consumers.
• Experience with performance, load, contract, resiliency, and automated testing.
• Strong knowledge of TDD/BDD methodologies, API testing practices, and validation frameworks.
• Expertise tracing requests across distributed systems and distinguishing gateway versus backend issues.
• Experience using Splunk, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry, logging, telemetry, metrics analysis, alerting, incident response, and performance troubleshooting.
• Proven experience applying security patches and managing production security controls.
• Strong understanding of OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWT, mTLS, threat protection, authorization models, rate limiting, vulnerability remediation, and DevSecOps practices.
• Ability to quickly learn enterprise security platforms and authentication frameworks.
• Experience working in Agile and "you build it, you run it" environments.
• Strong client communication and collaboration skills.
• Self-directed, thorough in testing and validation, and comfortable balancing production support with new development work.
• Empathy for both API producers and consumers.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with chaos engineering and large-scale configuration testing preferred.
• API lifecycle management, governance, onboarding, policy enforcement, and standardized gateway patterns.
• External partner integrations, vendor connectivity, hybrid-cloud routing, and enterprise boundary security.
• Developer enablement, onboarding support, documentation, templates, and best-practice implementation.
• Growth mindset with an "if I don't know it, I can learn it" attitude.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate changes for impact and risk, implement safely, and validate thoroughly.
• Build, test, deploy, and support Kong Gateway configurations, plugins, integrations, and new capabilities.
• Troubleshoot production issues and trace requests across the full stack from gateway to upstream services.
• Conduct performance, load, resiliency, and API testing.
• Apply security patches, implement security controls, and support incident response.
• Maintain documentation, configuration governance, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment standards.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed