Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Cognizant is a technology and engineering company seeking a KONG Administrator to deploy, configure, manage, and maintain Kong API Gateway infrastructure. The role supports secure, reliable, and scalable API operations across environments while collaborating with application, security, DevOps, and infrastructure teams.
Responsibilities
- Deploy, configure, and maintain Kong Gateway across development, staging, and production environments, including services, routes, consumers, plugins, upstreams, and multi-environment topologies
- Implement gateway security controls including API Key, OAuth 2.0, JWT, OIDC, mTLS, Basic Auth, ACL/RBAC, IP restrictions, certificate management, and rate limiting policies
- Manage traffic policies such as request throttling, quotas, load balancing, health checks, retries, circuit breakers, request/response transformations, and canary or A/B routing strategies
- Integrate Kong with observability platforms such as Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, or ELK, and monitor latency, error rates, audit logs, access logs, and upstream health metrics
- Support CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code practices by managing Kong configurations through decK, version control, GitOps workflows, zero-downtime updates, and rollback processes
Skills
- Hands-on experience administering Kong Gateway, Kong Manager, Kong Admin API, and/or decK for managing gateway configuration and deployment
- Strong knowledge of API gateway concepts including services, routes, consumers, plugins, upstreams, load balancing, and multi-environment gateway management
- Experience implementing API security and access control using OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, mTLS, API keys, ACL/RBAC, certificate rotation, IP restrictions, and related gateway controls
- Experience deploying and operating Kong in Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, Terraform, DB-less mode, or PostgreSQL/Cassandra-backed traditional mode
- Ability to configure traffic management, monitoring, logging, health checks, performance tuning, and high-availability/scalability controls for Kong data plane nodes
- This role is not able to offer visa transfer or sponsorship now or in the future
- Experience developing or integrating custom Kong plugins using Lua, Go, or Python, including plugin priority ordering and scoping at global, service, route, or consumer levels
- Experience with GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or similar CI/CD tools for automated Kong configuration deployments and rollback processes
- Familiarity with API governance, audit trails, naming conventions, runbooks, compliance support, and controls aligned to SOC 2, PCI-DSS, or HIPAA environments
- Experience administering Kong Developer Portal, API documentation, API onboarding, versioning strategies, deprecation policies, and consumer provisioning
- Working knowledge of protocols and API styles such as HTTP/S, REST, gRPC, WebSocket, GraphQL, and related integration patterns
- Work model: Remote from the United States
Benefits
- Remote position open to qualified applicants in the United States
- Cognizant’s discretionary annual incentive program, based on performance and subject to the terms of Cognizant’s applicable plans
- Medical/Dental/Vision/Life Insurance
- Paid holidays plus Paid Time Off
- 401(k) plan and contributions
- Long-term/Short-term Disability
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Various wellbeing programs
Company Overview