Platform Engineer, Specialist

• Growth mindset with an "if I don't know it, I can learn it" attitude.
• Experience working in Agile and "you build it, you run it" environments.
• Strong client communication and collaboration skills.
• Self-directed, thorough in testing and validation, and comfortable balancing production support with new development work.
• Empathy for both API producers and consumers.

Core Responsibilities

• Evaluate changes for impact and risk, implement safely, and validate thoroughly.
• Build, test, deploy, and support Kong Gateway configurations, plugins, integrations, and new capabilities.
• Troubleshoot production issues and trace requests across the full stack from gateway to upstream services.
• Conduct performance, load, resiliency, and API testing.
• Apply security patches, implement security controls, and support incident response.
• Maintain documentation, configuration governance, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment standards.

Technical Expertise

API Gateway & Kong

• Deep experience with Kong Gateway/Konnect, including services, routes, consumers, plugins, declarative configuration (decK), DB-less mode, Admin API, Control Plane/Data Plane architecture, and custom plugin development.
• Strong understanding of API gateway patterns, request/response lifecycles, traffic management, service abstraction, ingress/egress routing, and upstream/downstream services.
• Knowledge of Kong plugin execution, lifecycle management, standardization, and configuration governance.

Core Technology Stack

• Experience across networking, security, gateway, and delivery layers, including DNS, TLS, load balancing, authentication, authorization, rate limiting, routing, CI/CD, and configuration management.
• Strong experience with Docker, AWS ECS, containerized environments, infrastructure provisioning, horizontal scaling, secrets management, and platform operations.
• Familiarity with CloudFormation, infrastructure-as-code, high availability, resiliency patterns, failover strategies, and multi-region deployments.

Development & APIs

• Proficiency in Java, Python, Node.js, TypeScript, or similar languages; Lua preferred.
• Strong understanding of REST APIs, OpenAPI/Swagger, API versioning, contract testing, microservices architecture, and YAML-based configuration.
• Experience developing and supporting API integrations for internal and external consumers.

Testing & Quality

• Experience with performance, load, contract, resiliency, and automated testing.
• Strong knowledge of TDD/BDD methodologies, API testing practices, and validation frameworks.
• Experience with chaos engineering and large-scale configuration testing preferred.

Observability & Operations

• Expertise tracing requests across distributed systems and distinguishing gateway versus backend issues.
• Experience using Splunk, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry, logging, telemetry, metrics analysis, alerting, incident response, and performance troubleshooting.

Security

• Proven experience applying security patches and managing production security controls.
• Strong understanding of OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWT, mTLS, threat protection, authorization models, rate limiting, vulnerability remediation, and DevSecOps practices.
• Ability to quickly learn enterprise security platforms and authentication frameworks.

Additional Preferred Experience

• API lifecycle management, governance, onboarding, policy enforcement, and standardized gateway patterns.
• External partner integrations, vendor connectivity, hybrid-cloud routing, and enterprise boundary security.
• Developer enablement, onboarding support, documentation, templates, and best-practice implementation.

Special Factors

Sponsorship

Vanguard is not offering visa sponsorship for this position.

About Vanguard

At Vanguard, we don't just have a mission—we're on a mission.

To work for the long-term financial wellbeing of our clients. To lead through product and services that transform our clients' lives. To learn and develop our skills as individuals and as a team. From Malvern to Melbourne, our mission drives us forward and inspires us to be our best.

How We Work

Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for the majority of our crew members, designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning, collaboration, and connection. We believe our mission-driven and highly collaborative culture is a critical enabler to support long-term client outcomes and enrich the employee experience.