Ask HN: Load balancer that inspects response payloads?

One of my small projects runs Apache httpd as a load balancer in front of two web servers which produce XML. I got a new requirement that the load balancer should look for an element in the response XML and, when present, consider the web server that produced it as overloaded and throttle requests to it. Available options are augmenting httpd's configuration or replacing it with a new (open source) Linux software LB. Traffic is <100 reqs/sec and less than 2MB/sec, latency is not an issue.

Having a software engineering background my instinct is to program an LB of my own and be done, but supporting that would require upskilling my team (who are not software engineers). With respect to existing LBs/API gateways, what are my options?