Kong Gateway / Kubernetes Senior API Developer – VA Lighthouse Platform (Remote)

Fathom Management LLC•Austin, TX

1d•$150,000 - $170,000•Remote

About The Position

This role supports modernization initiatives for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) by designing and managing the API infrastructure that powers the VA Lighthouse digital health platform. Your work will enable secure healthcare data exchange, scalable digital services, and improved access to care for Veterans nationwide. Fathom Management, Inc. is seeking a Senior API Developer to lead Kong Gateway administration and enterprise API management across multiple engineering teams supporting a federal healthcare modernization program. This role combines API platform engineering, Kubernetes operations, DevOps automation, and API governance to ensure secure and scalable integration across healthcare systems. The ideal candidate will bring deep expertise in Kong Gateway, OpenAPI standards, cloud infrastructure, and DevSecOps practices while mentoring engineering teams and establishing platform standards for API delivery. You will collaborate with platform engineers, architects, DevOps teams, and federal stakeholders to support the VA Lighthouse platform and digital healthcare ecosystem.

Requirements

Hands-on experience administering Kong Gateway (open-source) in production environments
Experience developing or extending Kong plugins or advanced gateway policy configurations
Strong experience with API gateway architecture, including authentication, routing, rate limiting, and transformations
Strong API design expertise with OpenAPI Specification (OAS)
Experience implementing API governance pipelines, validation frameworks, and versioning strategies
Hands-on Kubernetes experience including deployment, scaling, and troubleshooting
Experience implementing DevOps delivery pipelines including CI/CD and GitOps practices
Experience implementing JWT authentication, claims validation, and key management
Experience integrating APIs with enterprise identity systems such as Active Directory
Bachelor's degree with 10+ years of professional experience
Must be legally authorized to work in the United States
Ability to obtain and maintain a VA Public Trust clearance

Nice To Haves

Experience deploying Kong Gateway at scale across multiple teams or multi-tenant platforms
Experience with AWS cloud platform engineering
Experience with GitOps tools such as ArgoCD or Flux
Experience with service mesh or gateway technologies such as Envoy, NGINX, or Istio
Experience implementing observability platforms such as Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus/Grafana
Experience implementing TLS, mTLS, and secure secrets management
Knowledge of OWASP API security practices
Experience working with federal compliance frameworks such as FedRAMP or FISMA
Experience mentoring engineering teams and establishing platform standards
Knowledge of SSO, SOA architecture, PowerShell scripting, Red Hat Linux environments
Familiarity with healthcare data security requirements (PII and PHI)

Responsibilities

Provide deep expertise in Kong Gateway platform administration.
Configure and manage Kong routes, services, consumers, upstreams, certificates, rate limiting, and logging.
Design, implement, and maintain custom Kong plugins and policy transformations.
Operate Kong in Kubernetes environments using Helm or operator-based deployments.
Define enterprise API design standards and review APIs for consistency, usability, and backward compatibility.
Author and maintain OpenAPI Specification (OAS) contracts and implement versioning and deprecation strategies.
Enable lifecycle management of OpenAPI documentation and governance pipelines.
Implement and manage API governance frameworks including validation pipelines and semantic versioning.
Implement and maintain authentication and authorization patterns, including JWT validation, claims mapping, and key rotation.
Integrate APIs with enterprise identity systems such as Active Directory and LDAP-style authentication ecosystems.
Enforce API gateway security controls, encryption, and access policies.
Deploy and manage Kubernetes resources, including Deployments, Services, Ingress/Gateway API objects, ConfigMaps, Secrets, and NetworkPolicies.
Provision and maintain AWS infrastructure resources, including compute, networking, load balancing, DNS, certificates, and secrets management.
Implement CI/CD and GitOps workflows supporting automated configuration promotion and rollback.
Implement API monitoring, analytics, and reporting dashboards to track usage, latency, error rates, and consumer activity.
Maintain operational observability stacks such as Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, or OpenTelemetry.
Troubleshoot Linux container runtime issues, TLS/certificate management, networking, DNS, and performance tuning.
Mentor development teams and establish engineering standards for API platform development.
Collaborate with DevOps teams, security engineers, architects, and product stakeholders.
Support incident response and production troubleshooting as a technical consultant.