Sr Engineer - DataPower & Kong Administrator

Where Ambition Meets Innovation

At LPL’s Global Capability Center, you'll find a collaborative culture where your voice matters, integrity guides every decision, and technology fuels progress. Your skills, talents, and ideas will redefine what's possible. LPL's success reflects its exceptional employees, who together pursue one noble purpose: empowering financial advisors to deliver personalized advice for all who need it. We’re proud to be expanding and reaching new heights in Hyderabad.

Join us as we create something extraordinary together.

Job Overview:

The Senior Engineer, Middleware API Infrastructure Engineer with expertise in IBM DataPower and Kong provides senior-level operational and architectural support for API gateway and messaging infrastructure. This role drives continuous improvement, automation, and governance for DataPower and Kong platforms.

Responsibilities:

• Install, configure, upgrade, and patch Kong Gateway (Enterprise) across Dev, Test, and Production environments.
• Manage Kong entities — services, routes, consumers, plugins, upstreams, certificates, and workspaces — via the Admin API, decK, and Terraform.
• Design and enforce plugin policies: rate limiting, OAuth 2.0/OIDC/JWT authentication, mTLS, request/response transformation, logging, and correlation-ID injection.
• Maintain and tune Kong Ingress Controller (KIC) configurations on Kubernetes clusters.
• Oversee Kong Manager (GUI) and Kong Developer Portal — access control, API documentation publishing, and developer onboarding.
• Act as Level 2/3 on-call support for Kong-related production incidents (P1/P2).
• Investigate and resolve gateway-layer issues: 4xx/5xx error spikes, latency outliers, plugin misconfigurations, upstream connectivity failures, and TLS certificate expiry.
• Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and author post-incident reports with corrective actions.
• Triage support tickets from internal API consumers and coordinate with upstream service owners.
• Maintain and test runbooks for common failure scenarios.

What are we looking for?

We’re looking for strong collaborators who deliver exceptional client experiences and thrive in fast-paced, team-oriented environments. Our ideal candidates pursue greatness, act with integrity, and are driven to help our clients succeed. We value those who embrace creativity, continuous improvement, and contribute to a culture where we win together and create and share joy in our work.

Requirements:

• 8+ years of middleware experience with deep expertise in IBM DataPower and Kong
• Advanced proficiency in DataPower policy development, GatewayScript, and XSLT
• 5+ years of experience in a platform engineering, API gateway, or infrastructure SRE role.
• 3+ years of hands-on Kong Gateway administration (Enterprise preferred; OSS acceptable).
• Strong understanding of HTTP/S, REST, gRPC, WebSocket, and TLS/mTLS.
• Experience with decK (declarative Kong config) and the Kong Admin API.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language: Python, Bash, or PowerShell.
• Experience with Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, or AKS) and Kong Ingress Controller.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools: Terraform and/or Helm.
• Practical experience with observability tooling (Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, or Datadog).
• Comfortable working in an on-call rotation with defined SLA/SLO commitments.

Preference:

• Experience with containerized DataPower (DataPower on Kubernetes/OpenShift)
• Knowledge of event-driven integration patterns and Kafka/MQ bridging
• Kong Certified Professional or equivalent certification.
• Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd) alongside Kong.
• Familiarity with API security standards: OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, API keys, JWT.

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