API Developer Lead

API Developer Lead – Fully Remote (Temp‑to‑Hire)

Salary: $135,000–$160,000

The VA Lighthouse Program is transforming how Veterans, partners, and internal teams access critical VA data through secure, scalable APIs. The program AI & Engineering team is seeking a fully remote API Developer Lead to support this mission across multiple teams. This is a temp‑to‑hire role, with conversion eligibility based on client requirements.

Responsibilities

• Administer and optimize Kong Gateway (routes, services, plugins, certificates, rate limiting, logging).
• Build and extend Kong plugins and manage Kong in Kubernetes (Helm/operator patterns, upgrades, config promotion).
• Define API standards, review API designs, and manage OpenAPI (OAS) contracts, versioning, and governance.
• Implement authentication and security patterns (JWT, claims mapping, key rotation, AD/LDAP integration).
• Build and operate Kubernetes resources; manage AWS networking, compute, load balancing, DNS, and secrets.
• Implement CI/CD and GitOps workflows, automated validation, and environment promotion.
• Deliver observability: API metering, dashboards, logs/metrics/traces, SLO reporting.
• Troubleshoot Linux/container issues and support on‑call operations with runbooks and documentation.

Required Experience

• Production experience administering Kong Gateway.
• Experience building/extending Kong plugins and deep gateway policy knowledge.
• Strong API design background and expert-level OpenAPI skills.
• API governance (linting, validation, contract testing, semantic versioning).
• Kubernetes deployment and troubleshooting.
• DevOps practices (GitOps, CI/CD, automation).
• Authentication expertise with JWT and enterprise identity systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS platform experience.
• Operating Kong at scale (multi-team, multi-tenant), performance tuning, migrations.
• GitOps tools (Argo CD, Flux).
• Service mesh/gateway ecosystem familiarity (Envoy, NGINX, Istio).
• Observability stacks (Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch).
• Security practices (TLS/mTLS, secrets management, OWASP API security).
• Experience mentoring teams and setting platform standards.