Kong db-less not loading kong.yml when start/restart

[recidive]

I've installed Kong db-less mode on an EKS cluster. When I installed it, I had to enter the shell for the Kong gateway and run kong reload for the db-less config to take effect. Now if for some reason Kong restarts, the config is not automatically loaded leaving all routes offline. For instance what's causing it to restart sometimes is:

E0528 22:04:42.705305       1 leaderelection.go:332] error retrieving resource lock api-gateway/kong-ingress-controller-leader-kong: Get "https://172.20.0.1:443/apis/coordination.k8s.io/v1/namespaces/api-gateway/leases/kong-ingress-controller-leader-kong": context deadline exceeded

Is there any way I can make kong reload kong.yml properly when it restarts?