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Kong is building the connectivity layer for AI, enabling organizations to secure, manage, and govern AI traffic across APIs and models. As Staff Product Manager for AI Management, you will own the product direction for Kong's fastest-growing agentic AI portfolio, including the flagship AI Gateway. This is a strategic role bridging technical innovation with enterprise runtime governance, context management, and developer platform experience.
You will architect and execute the product vision and roadmap for AI Management modules, driving core capabilities around agentic harnesses, LLM routing, policies, context, guardrails, and evaluation. You'll lead cross-departmental strategy across engineering, design, product marketing, and executive leadership to align shared roadmaps without operational friction. You own the full lifecycle of your product modules by writing precise specs, prioritizing backlogs, and balancing new feature delivery against technical debt and platform dependencies.
You will drive cross-product work connecting AI Management to Kong's core platform infrastructure, enabling seamless data plane and control plane integration. You'll speed up high-velocity delivery cadences in close partnership with engineering leads to scope work, navigate trade-offs, and accelerate time to market. You'll also support regional field activities, customer-facing technical engagements, and sales enablement to validate product-market fit and ensure developer delight.
Kong's culture emphasizes ownership (acting as a driver, holding yourself accountable for product outcomes), urgency (modeling speed and efficiency in a fast-paced pre-IPO landscape), and collaboration (leading cross-functionally and breaking down silos across global teams).
REQUIREMENTS:
- 7-10 years of technical product management experience owning and shipping technical products in developer tools, API platforms, or AI infrastructure
- Demonstrated ability to translate complex technical challenges (Model Context Protocol servers, request routing, data plane architectures, transport trade-offs) into actionable product requirements
- Proven track record driving execution and managing dependencies across globally distributed R&D teams
- Strong written and verbal communication skills to articulate technical strategy across multiple functions and seniority levels
- Deep project management instincts to track work, surface blockers early, and keep cross-functional roadmaps on schedule
BONUS:
- Direct experience with agentic AI development, including AI agents, AI gateways, LLM routing, AI observability, prompt management, guardrails, MCP servers, and A2A communications
- Familiarity with enterprise platform engineering, Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, control planes, and data planes
