I am making an app that does not require a user account/login, and allows the user to purchase a subscription. I want to use the Google Play Developer API to verify whether
As you have a web service which your app can call, I would recommend storing your private key securely on your server. You should look to moving as much of the in-app stuff to service calls, as possible, see this link. I've implemented in-app subscription, but it was before this part of the API was out. I had to do my own registration and security verification but it looks like this API does most of that for you, using OAuth, although it looks like you are still responsible for storing the subscription request/verification.
Where it talks about signing your JWT's with an existing library, they do appear to provide you with links to a java library, a Python library and a PHP library - it depends what your web service or server component is written in (mine is C#, so I'm using RSACryptoServiceProvider) to verify signed purchases. They're using JSON objects for the actual transfer of data.