Kong

Drive technical positioning, evangelism, and competitive strategy for AI traffic management and registry products. | 7+ years in product marketing or related roles with strong AI/ML platform interest and ability to communicate complex technical concepts. | Are you ready to unlock intelligence? If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others. About The Role Every enterprise deploying AI at scale faces the same challenge: governing an explosion of LLM, MCP, and agent traffic while giving developers a way to discover and consume AI resources safely. This role owns the technical narrative at the heart of that story. As Senior Technical PMM, you'll drive positioning, evangelism, and competitive strategy for Kong's AI traffic management capabilities — the AI gateway and guardrails that secure and control AI traffic in production — as well as our registry and discovery experience spanning AI, MCP, and agent registries. This is a core technical marketing role on the AI team, covering the most contested competitive ground in the market. What You’ll Do • Own positioning and messaging for AI traffic management — define and evolve the technical narrative for Kong's AI gateway and guardrails capabilities, including LLM routing, policy enforcement, content safety, and multi-agent traffic governance • Drive the registry and discovery story — build positioning for AI, MCP, and agent registries, covering listing, registration, governance, and the developer discovery experience • Lead technical field enablement for your domain — own product enablement within your domain for Kong Solution Engineers, Customer Success Managers, and other technical field roles • Serve as technical evangelist — represent Kong at industry events, analyst briefings, webinars, and customer conversations; produce technical content including demos, blogs, whitepapers, and reference architectures • Produce deep technical content — build demos, reference architectures, technical whitepapers, and documentation-adjacent content that helps architects and security teams evaluate and adopt Kong's approach • Partner with product on roadmap narrative — work closely with product management to shape how new capabilities are framed, named, and sequenced for maximum market impact • Fuel launches and campaigns — deliver technical positioning, proof points, and demo assets as structured inputs to the AI PMM's launch and campaign motions • Mentor and elevate — as the senior-most technical PMM on the team, raise the bar for technical storytelling across the AI portfolio Who You Are • 7+ years of experience in product marketing, product management, or solutions engineering—ideally at an AI/ML platform company • Genuine hands-on interest in AI infrastructure: you follow developments in LLM deployment, agentic frameworks, Model Context Protocol, and AI governance; you can speak credibly to AI platform engineers without bluffing • Proven ability to translate complex technical concepts into crisp narratives that land with both technical practitioners and C-suite buyers • Highly collaborative—you thrive working across Product, Marketing, Sales, and Partner teams • Comfortable owning a stage: keynote presentations, analyst briefings, customer roundtables, and demo-heavy sessions are energizing, not intimidating • Experience in open-source software, SaaS platforms, and enterprise go-to-market motions strongly preferred • Familiarity with the AI connectivity landscape—including awareness of competing and complementary vendors across API gateways, AI observability, vector databases, IPaaS, and agentic orchestration frameworks—is a strong plus About Kong Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong’s unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit www.konghq.com. Compensation Range: $153,090 - $251,505

Drive technical positioning, evangelism, and competitive strategy for AI traffic management and registry products. | 7+ years in product marketing or related roles with strong AI/ML platform interest and ability to communicate complex technical concepts. | Are you ready to unlock intelligence? If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others. About The Role Every enterprise deploying AI at scale faces the same challenge: governing an explosion of LLM, MCP, and agent traffic while giving developers a way to discover and consume AI resources safely. This role owns the technical narrative at the heart of that story. As Senior Technical PMM, you'll drive positioning, evangelism, and competitive strategy for Kong's AI traffic management capabilities — the AI gateway and guardrails that secure and control AI traffic in production — as well as our registry and discovery experience spanning AI, MCP, and agent registries. This is a core technical marketing role on the AI team, covering the most contested competitive ground in the market. What You’ll Do • Own positioning and messaging for AI traffic management — define and evolve the technical narrative for Kong's AI gateway and guardrails capabilities, including LLM routing, policy enforcement, content safety, and multi-agent traffic governance • Drive the registry and discovery story — build positioning for AI, MCP, and agent registries, covering listing, registration, governance, and the developer discovery experience • Lead technical field enablement for your domain — own product enablement within your domain for Kong Solution Engineers, Customer Success Managers, and other technical field roles • Serve as technical evangelist — represent Kong at industry events, analyst briefings, webinars, and customer conversations; produce technical content including demos, blogs, whitepapers, and reference architectures • Produce deep technical content — build demos, reference architectures, technical whitepapers, and documentation-adjacent content that helps architects and security teams evaluate and adopt Kong's approach • Partner with product on roadmap narrative — work closely with product management to shape how new capabilities are framed, named, and sequenced for maximum market impact • Fuel launches and campaigns — deliver technical positioning, proof points, and demo assets as structured inputs to the AI PMM's launch and campaign motions • Mentor and elevate — as the senior-most technical PMM on the team, raise the bar for technical storytelling across the AI portfolio Who You Are • 7+ years of experience in product marketing, product management, or solutions engineering—ideally at an AI/ML platform company • Genuine hands-on interest in AI infrastructure: you follow developments in LLM deployment, agentic frameworks, Model Context Protocol, and AI governance; you can speak credibly to AI platform engineers without bluffing • Proven ability to translate complex technical concepts into crisp narratives that land with both technical practitioners and C-suite buyers • Highly collaborative—you thrive working across Product, Marketing, Sales, and Partner teams • Comfortable owning a stage: keynote presentations, analyst briefings, customer roundtables, and demo-heavy sessions are energizing, not intimidating • Experience in open-source software, SaaS platforms, and enterprise go-to-market motions strongly preferred • Familiarity with the AI connectivity landscape—including awareness of competing and complementary vendors across API gateways, AI observability, vector databases, IPaaS, and agentic orchestration frameworks—is a strong plus About Kong Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong’s unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit www.konghq.com. Compensation Range: $153,090 - $251,505

Design and implement Kong-based solutions and automation frameworks while collaborating with cross-functional teams. | 8+ years in engineering roles with strong Kubernetes, cloud-native infrastructure, and programming skills in Python, Go, or Java. | Are you ready to unlock intelligence? If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others. Join the global leader in API and AI governance in the era of Artificial Intelligence! API traffic now outnumbers human traffic online, and a significant portion of that traffic is powered by the Kong platform, the world’s most popular API gateway. As organizations modernize for AI-driven connectivity, Kong is uniquely positioned at the center of enterprise transformation. About the Role: We are seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to join Kong’s growing Professional Services organization. This is a highly strategic, customer-facing engineering role focused on helping enterprise customers accelerate adoption of Kong’s API and AI Connectivity platform through hands-on implementation, automation, migration tooling, and solution engineering. As an FDE, you will work directly alongside customer engineering teams to solve complex technical challenges, accelerate migrations, build reusable automation, and deliver production-grade solutions in real-world enterprise environments. You will operate at the intersection of software engineering, architecture, platform engineering, and customer delivery. This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy building, coding, solving ambiguous problems, and working directly with customers on mission-critical initiatives involving APIs, AI gateways, service connectivity, modernization, and cloud-native platforms. You will collaborate closely with Solutions Architects, Engagement Managers, Product Engineering, Customer Success, and Product teams to ensure successful customer outcomes while also influencing Kong’s product direction based on field experience. Working at Kong is a unique opportunity to make a massive impact on Fortune 50/500 customers as they modernize mission-critical systems for the AI era. What’s in it for you? Impact Work directly with some of the world’s largest enterprises to modernize API infrastructure and accelerate AI adoption through Kong’s connectivity platform. Growth Accelerate your technical and professional growth through exposure to cutting-edge cloud-native technologies, distributed systems, AI connectivity, automation frameworks, and large-scale enterprise architectures. Opportunity Be part of a rapidly growing Professional Services organization that is shaping how enterprises adopt APIs, AI gateways, and modern connectivity platforms globally. What You’ll Do: Partner directly with enterprise customers to design, build, and implement Kong-based solutions across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments. Lead hands-on implementation efforts for API gateways, AI gateways, service mesh, developer portals, and related connectivity technologies. Build automation frameworks, migration tooling, custom integrations, and reusable accelerators to simplify customer adoption and modernization efforts. Drive migration initiatives from legacy API management platforms to Kong. Work closely with customer developers, platform teams, architects, security teams, and executives to solve complex technical and operational challenges. Develop production-grade code, scripts, plugins, CI/CD integrations, Kubernetes automation, and infrastructure tooling as part of customer engagements. Collaborate with Kong Product and Engineering teams to influence roadmap priorities based on real-world customer feedback and implementation learnings. Create reusable best practices, technical assets, reference architectures, documentation, and design patterns to scale delivery excellence across the organization. Support strategic customer initiatives involving AI connectivity, governance, platform modernization, and cloud-native transformation. What You’ll Bring: Experience 8+ years in customer-facing engineering, platform engineering, professional services, site reliability engineering, or software engineering roles. Strong hands-on software engineering and implementation experience. Experience with API gateways, API management, integrations, or distributed systems platforms. Strong Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure expertise. Experience building automation frameworks, deployment tooling, CI/CD pipelines, or migration tooling. Strong proficiency in Linux, networking, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps practices. Experience with major cloud providers including AWS, Azure, or GCP. Programming experience in languages such as Python, Go, Java, JavaScript, or Lua. Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and automation tooling such as Terraform, Helm, Ansible, or GitOps frameworks. Prior experience working in API Management, Open Source, Middleware, SaaS, or Infrastructure software companies is highly preferred. Preferred Attributes: Strong builder mindset with the ability to solve complex technical problems with minimal supervision. Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving enterprise environments. Passion for working directly with customers and delivering measurable business outcomes. Excellent communication and collaboration skills across technical and executive audiences. Highly organized with strong prioritization and execution skills. Passion for innovation, modern infrastructure, APIs, AI, and cloud-native technologies. Team-oriented with a strong sense of ownership and accountability. About Kong: Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.

Design and build scalable distributed backend systems using Golang and collaborate with senior engineers to develop platform capabilities. | Strong production experience with Golang and designing distributed systems at scale, plus proficiency with PostgreSQL and Redis. | Are you ready to unlock intelligence? If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others. Kong is building the future of API and AI infrastructure. Our platform powers connectivity for thousands of organizations globally across APIs, microservices, Kubernetes and now AI agents and LLM-driven applications. The Role We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join Kong’s Office of the CTO team and work on special, high-impact projects that influence the direction of our platform and engineering strategy. The Office of the CTO (OCTO) is where Kong’s most ambitious and exploratory engineering work happens, new platforms, foundational systems and high-impact technical bets that shape the company’s future. You’ll work on everything from distributed database provisioning and durable workflow orchestration to LLM fine-tuning and infrastructure for our AI Builder capabilities, helping define a new foundation for how developers build and run AI-driven systems at scale. This is a rare opportunity to shape a greenfield AI platform from the ground up, with direct input into architecture, tooling, and developer experience. This is a role for engineers who enjoy deep technical challenges, ambiguity, and building systems that matter. What You’ll Do: Design and build highly scalable distributed backend systems Develop core services in Golang, with a focus on performance and reliability Work with PostgreSQL and Redis to build robust, data-intensive systems Architect systems that operate across microservices, networking layers, and cloud platforms Collaborate closely with the CTO and senior engineers on strategic technical initiatives Prototype and productionize new platform capabilities and internal tooling Influence engineering direction and technical standards across Kong What you'll bring: Strong production experience with Golang Experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale Solid experience with PostgreSQL and Redis in production environments Experience building backend systems with high availability, scalability, and reliability Strong systems thinking, debugging, and performance optimization skills Bonus points: Experience with Kubernetes, networking, or API gateways Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) Contributions to open source or internal platform tooling Experience working on platform, infra, or developer tooling products About Kong: Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.

Design and implement advanced identity platform features including token management, security, and compliance at enterprise scale. | 7+ years building identity platforms with deep expertise in OAuth, OpenID Connect, cryptography, and enterprise identity integration. | Are you ready to unlock intelligence? If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others. About The Role Kong is building the future of API management for developers. We’re a fast-growing, well-funded company with happy customers and motivated employees. Insomnia, acquired in 2019, is a full-lifecycle API development platform that has quickly become an integral part of Kong’s product portfolio. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Konnect team at Kong, you’ll architect Kong Identity's multi-tenant identity platform supporting complex organizational hierarchies, cross-tenant isolation, and enterprise-grade security controls. What You'll Do • Design and implement advanced token management systems, including refresh token rotation, proof-of-possession tokens, and custom token introspection with real-time revocation capabilities. • Lead development of Kong Identity's extensible claims engine supporting dynamic attribute resolution, contextual claim injection, and complex business logic evaluation at token issuance. • Architect global identity infrastructure with edge optimization, intelligent token caching, and cross-region replication strategies for sub-millisecond authentication latency worldwide. • Design sophisticated rate limiting, anomaly detection, and fraud prevention systems to protect against credential stuffing, token abuse, and distributed attacks. • Build enterprise identity federation capabilities, including SAML bridge patterns, external IdP chaining, and custom protocol adapters for legacy system integration. • Lead technical strategy for Kong Identity's developer experience, including SDKs, webhooks, audit logging, and real-time analytics dashboards for token lifecycle visibility. • Architect advanced client management systems supporting dynamic client registration, automated credential rotation, and programmatic policy enforcement. • Design Kong Identity's plugin architecture enables custom grant flows, protocol extensions, and third-party integrations while maintaining security boundaries. • Drive implementation of compliance frameworks (SOC 2, FedRAMP, GDPR), including comprehensive audit trails, data residency controls, and privacy-preserving token designs. • Lead technical initiatives for Kong Identity's integration with observability platforms, supporting distributed tracing, metrics collection, and security event correlation. • Mentor engineering teams on advanced identity concepts including zero-trust architectures, workload identity, and service mesh integration patterns. What You'll Bring • 7+ years of experience building production identity platforms at leading identity providers or enterprise software companies, with proven track record of handling millions of authentication requests daily. • Deep expertise in advanced OAuth 2.0 extensions (PKCE, mTLS, JWT bearer assertions, token exchange), OpenID Connect profiles, and emerging standards like OAuth 2.1 and GNAP. • Proven experience architecting multi-tenant identity platforms with complex isolation requirements, tenant-specific configurations, and enterprise feature sets. • Strong background in cryptographic protocols including advanced JWT patterns, key rotation strategies, Hardware Security Module (HSM) integration, and post-quantum cryptography considerations. • Experience building identity platforms with sophisticated analytics, real-time monitoring, and security event detection capabilities at enterprise scale. • Expertise in global identity infrastructure including edge deployment strategies, geo-distributed token validation, and cross-region data consistency patterns. • Deep understanding of enterprise identity integration patterns including SAML federation, LDAP/AD bridges, SCIM provisioning, and custom protocol adapters. • Proven track record building developer-first identity platforms including comprehensive SDKs, webhook systems, and extensible API designs. • Experience with identity platform security including threat modeling, penetration testing coordination, and implementation of advanced attack prevention mechanisms. • Strong background in compliance and regulatory requirements for identity systems including audit trail design, data residency controls, and privacy engineering. • Experience building identity platforms supporting complex organizational structures, delegated administration, and fine-grained permission models. • Expertise in high-performance system design including horizontal scaling strategies, caching architectures, and latency optimization for identity operations. • Knowledge of service mesh identity patterns, workload identity bootstrapping, and integration with container orchestration platforms. • Experience with identity protocol extensions, custom grant flows, and building extensible identity platforms that support diverse use cases. • Proven ability to lead technical initiatives in complex, regulated environments while balancing innovation with security and compliance requirements. About Kong Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit www.konghq.com. Compensation Range: $150K - $275K

Lead and architect scalable, fault-tolerant cloud-native systems while managing enterprise customer implementations and ensuring platform reliability. | Extensive SRE experience with Kubernetes, cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure), Go programming, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring tools, and strong customer-facing skills. | Are you ready to unlock intelligence? If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others. Senior SRE, Managed Gateways About The Role Kong's Managed Gateways is the fastest-growing product in the Kong portfolio, a SaaS offering with ARR growing multifold. As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer focused on Managed Gateways, you'll be instrumental in architecting and maintaining the resilient, scalable infrastructure that powers Kong's mission-critical managed services — and you'll be the technical face of that product for the enterprise customers who depend on it, directly ensuring the reliability and performance that lets them build the next generation of connected applications at global scale. What You’ll Do Cloud Gateways is a complex, multi-cloud problem — supported across AWS, GCP, and Azure — and our enterprise customers run large, often unique topologies. This role carries two equally deep engineering mandates: owning production reliability for the platform, and acting as the senior technical authority who takes an enterprise customer from kickoff to a fully successful, live implementation. Platform & Reliability Engineering • Lead, mentor, and inspire a high-performing team of Site Reliability Engineers dedicated to Kong's Managed Gateway offerings. • Architect and implement robust, scalable, and fault-tolerant cloud-native systems using technologies like Kubernetes, Golang, and major cloud providers. • Own the end-to-end operational lifecycle, from proactive monitoring and alerting to incident response and blameless post-mortems, ensuring continuous service improvement. • Drive a culture of developer delight by implementing automation, self-service tooling, and streamlined workflows for deploying and managing API gateways. • Define, track, and report on key SLOs and SLIs to ensure optimal performance and reliability of Managed Gateways. • Champion technical debt prevention and advocate for architectural best practices that enhance system resilience and reduce operational toil. • Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, engineering, and Customer Success to influence roadmap decisions and ensure operational readiness for new features. Enterprise Implementation Engineering • Partner directly with enterprise customers — working alongside Product leadership, Professional Services, and Customer Success — to drive end-to-end onboarding and implementation of Cloud Gateways, and productize recurring implementation patterns into repeatable playbooks and platform capabilities. • Bring deep, cross-cloud breadth (AWS, GCP, Azure) to handle unique customer topologies and turn complex setups into successful, production-ready deployments. • Serve as the technical owner of the customer relationship through implementation, primarily supporting our North America customer base, and be the escalation point Customer Success leans on for technically complex accounts. • Feed real-world implementation patterns and customer constraints back to Product to further contribute the roadmap. What You’ll Bring The Toolkit • Extensive experience as a Site Reliability Engineer, focusing on highly available and distributed systems. • Deep expertise with Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures, preferably across multiple public cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure). • Strong proficiency in Golang or similar modern programming languages for automation and tool development. • Proven track record in building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible). • In-depth knowledge of monitoring, logging, and alerting systems (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Datadog). • Experience with managed services, API gateways, or similar network infrastructure is highly desirable. The Kong DNA • You take immense ownership of your systems, treating reliability as a first-class feature. • You operate with a sense of urgency, especially in critical situations, and drive quick, effective resolutions. • You thrive in a collaborative environment, actively sharing knowledge and elevating the entire team. • Kong moves fast, and our team's spread across continents and time zones — plans shift mid-flight, and things don't always line up neatly. You don't need everything settled to do good work. You bring your own calm to the noise, figure things out as you go, and help the people around you do the same. Bonus Points • Experience with Service Mesh technologies (e.g., Istio, Linkerd). • Familiarity with database administration for high-throughput systems (PostgreSQL, Cassandra). • Contributions to open-source SRE tools or projects. • Relevant cloud certifications (e.g., AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, CKA). About Kong Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit www.konghq.com. Compensation Range: $113K - $162K