API Developer Lead

Initiate Government Solutions

15h•Remote

About The Position

Founded in 2007, Initiate Government Solutions (IGS) is a Woman-Owned Small Business and a fully remote IT services provider supporting federal partners nationwide. We deliver innovative Enterprise IT and Health Services solutions with a strong focus on data analytics, health informatics, cloud migration, AI, and the modernization of federal information systems. Our vision is to be a health IT trendsetter, continuing to solve the nation’s most challenging healthcare IT issues by conceiving, designing, and building solid, creative, and innovative open-source solutions. Our mission is to innovate, design, and deliver tailored solutions that balance technical advancement with cost-awareness while providing exceptional service. IGS is currently recruiting for a remote API Developer Lead to support our work with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Assignment of Work and Travel: This is a remote access assignment. The Candidate will work remotely daily and will remotely access customer systems and therein use approved customer provided communications systems. Travel is not required; however, the candidate may be required to attend onsite client meetings as requested. This program is a transformative initiative by the customer, aimed at modernizing and streamlining access to data and services through secure, reliable, and scalable APIs. As a member of the team, you will play a key role in designing, developing, and supporting API solutions that empower veterans, partners, and internal stakeholders to access critical information and services efficiently. This role will be over multiple teams executing Kong administration and API Management. You will need to work with team leaders on the following topics:

Requirements

Hands-on experience with Kong Gateway (open-source) administration in real environments (not just POC).
Experience building/extending Kong plugins and/or deep Kong policy configuration patterns.
API gateway concerns (auth, routing, rate limiting, basic transforms, logging).
Strong API design background + strong working knowledge of OpenAPI (OAS).
API governance: linting/validation pipelines for OpenAPI, contract testing, semantic versioning strategies.
Kubernetes experience (deploying, operating, troubleshooting).
DevOps delivery practices (gitOps, CI/CD, config promotion, automation).
Auth experience: JWT validation/claims, key management/rotation; familiarity integrating with enterprise identity (e.g., AD-style ecosystems).
Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust security clearance;
US Citizenship required due to clearance requirement.

Nice To Haves

Working experience in AWS for platform workloads.
Kong at scale (multi-team, multi-tenant patterns), performance tuning, and upgrade/migration experience.
Experience with GitOps (e.g., Argo CD/Flux concepts)
Experience with service mesh / gateway ecosystem concepts (Envoy, NGINX, Istio)
Observability stack: Datadog/Splunk (or similar - Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, OpenTelemetry)
Security practices: TLS, mTLS concepts, secrets management, OWASP API security considerations, audit logging.
Experience mentoring teams and setting platform standards (enablement mindset).
Active VA Public Trust
Prior experience supporting federal agencies
Certifications in cloud technologies, API development, or secure software engineering.
Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices.
Prior, successful experience working in a remote environment

Responsibilities

Provide Kong platform engineering expertise.
Administer Kong (routes, services, consumers, upstreams, certificates, rate limiting, logging).
Design, implement, and maintain Kong plugins (custom or extended), including policy enforcement and transformations.
Operate Kong in Kubernetes (Helm/operator patterns as applicable), upgrades, config promotion across environments.
Provide API design & contract management expertise.
Define API standards and review APIs for consistency, usability, and backward compatibility.
Author and maintain OpenAPI Specification (OAS) contracts; implement versioning and deprecation practices.
Enable hosting and lifecycle workflows for OpenAPI docs/specs (publishing, validation, governance checks).
Provide Security & authentication expertise.
Implement/maintain authN/authZ patterns: JSON Web Tokens (JWT) issuance/validation/claims mapping, token modification, key rotation.
Integrate with directory/identity services (e.g., Active Directory (AD) / LDAP-style patterns) and common gateway security controls.
Provide Cloud + DevOps / platform expertise
Experience Building Kubernetes resources (Deployments, Services, Ingress/Gateway API objects as relevant, ConfigMaps/Secrets, NetworkPolicies).
Provision and manage Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources needed for the platform (networking, compute, load balancing, DNS, certificates, secrets).
Implement DevOps processes: CI/CD, GitOps patterns, automated testing/validation of configs/specs, environment promotion, rollback.
Experience with Observability, metering, and reporting
Implement API metering/usage analytics, dashboards, and operational reporting (SLIs/SLOs, error rates, latency, top consumers/routes).
Instrument logs/metrics/traces; build actionable dashboards and extract periodic reports for stakeholders.
Systems administration (practical ops)
Troubleshoot Linux/container runtime issues; manage certs, TLS, networking, DNS, and performance tuning.
Participate in on-call/escalations as needed; produce runbooks and operational documentation.

Benefits

Initiate Government Solutions offers competitive compensation and a robust benefits package, including comprehensive medical, dental, and vision care, matching 401K and profit sharing, paid time off, training time for personal development, flexible spending accounts, employer-paid life insurance, employer-paid short and long term disability coverage, an education assistance program with potential merit increases for obtaining a work-related certification, employee recognition, and referral programs, spot bonuses, and other benefits that help provide financial protection for the employee and their family.

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