API Developer Lead
About this role
MKS2 Technologies, LLC, an award-winning high growth small business, creates innovative and customer-centric technology solutions in the areas of Cyber Security, Instructional Design and Training, Software Engineering and IT Support Services to improve the security and well-being of our clients. Our commitment to excellence and our “Mission First” orientation has resulted in steady growth and an expanding client base across government agencies. We have employees nationwide and for the past three consecutive years were named one of the fastest growing Veteran-owned companies in the nation. Please take a moment to browse through our website and learn more about what it means to serve with MKS2.
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.
Diversity creates a healthier atmosphere: MKS2 Technologies is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity / Affirmative Action employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.
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