It seems that there might be a regression from Drools 6.x. This line in my code worked fine:

KieServices ks = KieServices.Factory.get()

But now does not. The only thing I did was upgrade these dependencies in my pom.xml (as well as updated my OSGi features to install the right bundles)

org.drools.drools-core
org.drools.drools-compiler
org.kie.kie-api
org.kie.soup.kie-soup-project-datamodel-api
org.kie.soup.kie-soup-commons
org.kie.soup.kie-soup-project-datamodel-commons

Lastly, there have been a few StackOverflows related to this, but none of the answers are overwhelmingly positive:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49295671/kieservices-factory-get-returns-null-in-kie-api7-6-0
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47556233/drools-7-4-1-kieservices-factory-get-returns-null
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jbpm-usage/aD58UTCqu-c