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Kong is the connectivity layer for AI, a 6-time Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader serving Fortune 500 enterprises. Professional Services is one of the fastest-growing parts of the company, and this role leads Kong's US Professional Services delivery organization.
You will manage a team of Forward Deployed Engineers and Engagement Managers, owning the full engagement lifecycle for your book of business. This is a leadership role focused on delivery outcomes, staffing decisions, and team growth—not hands-on delivery work. You are directly responsible for go-live dates, technical quality, customer satisfaction, and the career development of your team members.
Key responsibilities include:
- Hiring, coaching, and performance management of Forward Deployed Engineers and Engagement Managers
- Owning delivery outcomes across your portfolio: go-live dates, technical quality, and customer satisfaction metrics
- Staffing the right engineer and engagement manager to each engagement based on account complexity and team capacity
- Serving as the senior escalation point on at-risk or high-complexity engagements, driving resolution personally
- Running team operating cadence: staffing reviews, at-risk reviews, 1:1s, and status reporting
- Partnering with Sales, Customer Success, and Solutions Architecture to scope engagements accurately and ensure clean handoffs from pre-sale to delivery
- Setting and enforcing delivery standards: reusable accelerators, reference architectures, and best practices
- Feeding field learnings back to Kong Product and Engineering to shape the roadmap
- Leading team initiatives on AI connectivity, governance, platform modernization, and cloud-native transformation
This role sits at the intersection of people leadership, technical delivery, and enterprise account management. You'll work daily with Solutions Architects, Sales, Customer Success, Product, and Product Engineering. Success is measured on outcomes, not activity. The opportunity is significant: AI connectivity is a land grab, and the person who builds this team's delivery model in the next 18 months owns a track record that shapes the organization's future.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years in customer-facing engineering, professional services, or platform engineering
- 2+ years directly managing a technical, customer-facing team
- Track record of delivery leadership in API gateways, API management, integrations, or distributed systems platforms—deep enough to direct and evaluate team work
- Experience managing staffing, capacity, and prioritization across a portfolio of concurrent enterprise engagements
- Strong Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure fluency
- Experience with major cloud providers: AWS, Azure, or GCP
- Comfort directing and evaluating automation frameworks, deployment tooling, CI/CD pipelines, or migration tooling
- Prior experience in API Management, Open Source, Middleware, SaaS, or Infrastructure software companies is a strong plus
PREFERRED ATTRIBUTES:
- Decisive leadership mindset; comfortable making staffing and prioritization calls and driving them to resolution
- Ability to operate in ambiguous, fast-moving enterprise environments
- Genuine passion for growing engineers and engagement managers into their next role
- Excellent communication across technical and executive audiences, internal and customer-facing
- Highly organized with strong prioritization and execution across multi-account portfolios
- Real enthusiasm for AI, modern infrastructure, and cloud-native technology
- Strong sense of ownership for outcomes not always fully in your control
