Urgent C2C Role Kong Architect Fort Mill, SC

Role: Kong Architect

Location: Fort Mill, SC

Contract

Job Description*

Must-Have (Hard Requirements):

Strong, hands-on Kong expertise — approximately 4+ years of active Kong experience is the target (the client noted Kong hasn’t existed for 10 years, so 4 solid hands-on years is considered very strong)

Deep knowledge of OpenAPI specs and how APIs work in general

Networking and load balancing experience — specifically how traffic traverses within cloud environments, through transit gateways, across multiple data centers for low latency

Understanding of inbound/outbound API flow and implementations

Experience with AWS landing zones and transit gateway architecture

Terraform and CI/CD pipeline experience

DevOps automation (specifically GitHub Actions was called out)

Self-service automation experience — building Terraform modules that automate API creation, repo creation, and API migration end-to-end

Nice to Have:

DataPower experience (since they’re migrating FROM DataPower, familiarity helps with analysis of existing integrations)

Experience with other API management platforms such as Apigee or IBM API Connect

Cloudflare or F5 edge/CDN experience

Job Responsibilities & Day-to-Day Work

This is explicitly a hands-on role, not a whiteboard/diagram-drawing architect position. The client was very clear about this. Day-to-day work includes:

Supporting intake requests as application teams onboard onto the Kong platform

Reviewing architecture submissions and guiding teams through migration

Building and maintaining self-service Terraform automation modules (the goal is a “click of a button” workflow that creates an API, spins up a repo, and migrates the API through QA and the full SDLC)

Troubleshooting migration issues across the full SDLC

Analyzing existing DataPower integrations and providing guidance on how to move them to AWS landing zones and proxy them through Kong

Supporting application teams when issues arise once the platform opens broadly

The volume of intake requests is expected to be very high once the platform fully opens, so troubleshooting and support will be a significant part of the role