Senior Staff Product Manager, Kong
AI Gateway
$177-221.3k
Microservice API gateway
Be an early applicant
Microservice API gateway
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$177-221.3k
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To build the nervous system that will safely and reliably connect all of humankind!
Role
Who you are
- Experience: 8+ years of product management experience, including ownership of technical infrastructure or developer products at scale
- Enterprise GTM Acumen: Proven success launching and growing enterprise-facing products — particularly those involving platform or middleware technologies. Comfort working across sales, marketing, and solution engineering to align roadmap with commercial goals
- Technical Curiosity & Depth: Solid understanding of APIs, networking, middleware, or developer infrastructure. Familiarity with AI/ML concepts (e.g. LLMs, embeddings, prompt chaining) is preferred, though deep AI expertise is not required
- Cross-Functional Leadership: Confidence engaging with diverse stakeholders — from field engineers to enterprise customers to the CTO — and translating their inputs into clear requirements, use cases, and prioritization frameworks
- Execution Excellence: Ability to break down complex initiatives into iterative milestones and drive high-quality execution in partnership with engineering and design leads
- Communication & Clarity: Strong written and verbal communicator. Able to frame technical trade-offs clearly and influence decisions across levels
What the job involves
- As a Senior Staff Product Manager for Kong’s AI Gateway, you will lead one of our most strategic product bets
- The AI Gateway is a first-of-its-kind infrastructure layer built to govern, secure, and accelerate GenAI adoption within modern enterprises
- It is deeply aligned with how large-scale AI applications are evolving — toward agents, orchestration, and composable function architectures
- In this role, you will work closely with a world-class engineering team and partner directly with Kong’s CTO and co-founder to shape product direction
- You will own the product end-to-end: from roadmap to execution, enterprise GTM, and customer success
- This role spans deep technical work, strategic storytelling, and strong cross-functional execution across product, engineering, and field teams
- At Kong, you’ll operate in a small and high-impact environment where your decisions will shape how some of the world’s largest companies build with AI
- Define and Drive Product Vision: Own and evolve the product vision for Kong’s AI Gateway — a critical infrastructure layer for governing and accelerating GenAI workloads. Collaborate with engineering, design, field teams, and Kong’s CTO to ensure strategic clarity and technical feasibility across agentic AI use cases
- Lead Execution: Work closely with engineering and design leads to define and deliver high-impact capabilities across caching, routing, security, and observability for LLM-powered applications. Ensure each release delivers meaningful value to enterprise customers and reinforces Kong’s differentiated position in the AI ecosystem
- Shape Customer-Driven Strategy: Develop a deep understanding of how enterprises are adopting LLMs, agents, and GenAI workflows. Use insights from strategic customers, market trends, and internal usage to guide prioritization and product-market fit. Validate concepts through design partners and MVP iterations
- Ensure Cross-Functional Alignment: Align engineering, GTM, and platform stakeholders on priority use cases, customer deliverables, and field enablement. Drive alignment across core platform teams when AI Gateway intersects with Konnect, Kong Gateway, or new runtime capabilities like MCP
- Build Roadmaps and Launch Plans: Own and maintain a public-facing roadmap and internal planning artifacts. Partner with Product Marketing and Enablement to ensure field readiness and a clear narrative around product capabilities, roadmap, and competitive differentiation
- Drive Communication and Leadership Visibility: Proactively communicate progress, decisions, and risks to executive stakeholders — including Kong’s CTO and product leadership. Translate technical details into strategic implications, ensuring the broader organization understands the “why” behind roadmap bets
Our take
Kong provides a cutting-edge API and service lifecycle management platform tailored for modern architectures, such as microservices, containers, cloud, and serverless environments. With a focus on flexibility, scalability, speed, and performance, Kong allows developers and Global 5000 enterprises to securely connect and orchestrate microservice APIs for today's sophisticated applications.
The core products offered by Kong include Kong, an open-source API and Microservices management solution Galileo, a platform for API analytics and debugging; Gelato, a platform for creating developed portals for PIs and Microservices; and API Marketplace, a hub for discovering and publishing cloud APIs. Additionally, the recent introduction of a new collection of AI plug-ins in Kong Gateway 3.6 enhances the platform's capabilities further, reinforcing its commitment to innovation and advancement.
In pursuit of growth, the company is prioritizing expanding its marketing efforts, bolstering its customer service team, and accelerating product development. By focusing on these key areas, Kong aims to continue providing unparalleled solutions and support to its ever-expanding user base in the rapidly evolving landscape of modern application development.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Nov 2024
$175m
SERIES E
Feb 2021
$100m
SERIES D
Total funding: $344.1m
Company benefits
- Flexible time off: Take time to take care of yourself and the things that matter most
- Stock options: We want you to share in our success. That's why stock options are offered to most Kongers
- U-First Fridays: Get 4 hours a month for continuous learning with a book, podcast, or course of your choice
- Virtual events: Stay connected with Donut chats, trivia, fitness challenges, guided meditations, and more
- Dedicated unplug days: Silence those notifications. Enjoy some well-deserved long weekend where the entire team unplugs
- Home office stipend: Build a home office environment tailored to support your productivity
Company HQ
The East Cut, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Augusto Marietti
(CEO)Previously founded Mashape API Marketplace. Before Mashape, Augusto was an SF homeless immigrant from Italy.
Janet Phillips
(Vice President of People)Previously Director at SonicWALL for 5 years and Senior Director at Symantec for 7 years.
Marco Palladino
(CTO)Previously co-founded MemboxX, an online service for storing documents and small pieces of personal data.
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