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Kong is building the AI connectivity layer, enabling developers to connect, secure, govern, and scale AI applications. The AI Management product area—including the flagship AI Gateway—is one of Kong's most strategic and fastest-growing divisions.
You will join the AI Management product team as a Staff Product Manager based in Milan, owning product direction for AI Management modules that help connect, govern, supervise, and optimize agentic AI systems. This includes work across models, context, agentic harnesses, guardrails, evaluation, policies, and related infrastructure.
Key responsibilities include:
• Owning the product direction and roadmap for assigned AI Management modules, defining requirements, writing specifications, prioritizing backlogs, and driving feature delivery in close collaboration with engineering teams.
• Driving cross-product infrastructure work that connects your modules to other AI Management components and Kong's broader platform, navigating shared roadmaps and negotiating priorities across distributed teams.
• Balancing new feature development against technical debt, infrastructure work, and platform dependencies while maintaining reliable delivery cadence.
• Serving as the connective tissue between engineering, design, product marketing, and leadership, keeping stakeholders informed across time zones and ensuring alignment.
• Supporting field activities including customer-facing calls, product marketing input, and sales enablement, leveraging your technical knowledge and regional proximity.
You will report directly to the Director & Head of AI Products and work in close partnership with the broader AI Management R&D team, collaborating with product managers and engineers globally.
REQUIREMENTS:
• 7–10 years of product management experience with a track record of owning and shipping technical products, ideally in agentic AI, infrastructure, developer tools, and/or platform software.
• Experience driving product delivery across distributed teams, comfortable working across time zones, navigating inter-team dependencies, and maintaining momentum without direct authority over all contributors.
• Strong ability to translate ambiguous technical problems into clear product requirements; can break down infrastructure challenges and turn them into executable specifications.
• Clear and proactive communication skills, both written and verbal, capable of bridging globally distributed stakeholders across functions and seniority levels.
• Solid project management instincts: ability to track work, surface blockers, and keep roadmaps on track.
• Comfortable engaging with technical depth—no coding required, but should be conversant in MCP servers, transport protocols, request routing, data plane architecture, and infrastructure trade-offs.
• Bonus: Direct experience with agentic AI development and products, including AI agents, AI gateways, LLM routing, AI observability, prompt management, guardrails, and cost/quality optimizations.
• Bonus: Familiarity with enterprise platform engineering and infrastructure, including data planes, control planes, Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, and platform engineering workflows.
