16 days ago
Base Salary
$220k - $250k/yr
Responsibilities
- Support field sales by helping customers understand the Kong API and AI connectivity platform.
- Conduct discovery conversations and map customer requirements to Kong solutions from product review through production.
- Lead technical validation, stakeholder alignment, and support for proof-of-concepts throughout the evaluation process.
- Ensure customer satisfaction across assigned accounts and advocate for customer needs with support, product, and engineering teams.
- Create technical documentation for DevOps, implementations, and services engagements.
- Lead API management and AI governance evaluations, including API and AI use cases, LLM traffic management, and governance requirements.
- Demonstrate Kong API and AI governance and agentic connectivity capabilities, including MCP governance, semantic caching, prompt guardrails, and shadow AI detection.
- Run API and AI-focused Technical Feasibility Workshops for modern and AI/agentic architectures.
- Own technical strategy for complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise deals from qualification through close.
- Mentor and coach junior solutions engineers on technical skills, discovery methods, and deal strategy.
- Author technical blogs, host webinars, speak at industry events, and provide thought leadership.
- Synthesize customer feedback and market signals into actionable input for the product team.
Requirements
- At least 7 years of software engineering and/or solutions engineering experience at a SaaS, open source, or enterprise software company.
- Proven experience owning complex enterprise-level deals involving multiple technical and executive stakeholders.
- Experience mentoring or coaching solutions engineers or technical team members.
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-native platforms.
- Experience with REST and GraphQL APIs, CI/CD pipelines, and API security patterns including OAuth2, OIDC, and mTLS.
- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex, or equivalent.
- Working knowledge of AI/LLM architectures, including model routing, rate limiting, semantic caching, and prompt governance.
- Familiarity with Model Context Protocol and agentic AI patterns.
- Solid understanding of cloud computing trends and open source business models.
- Strong listening and communication skills for leading discussions with engineers, architects, and executives.
- Enthusiasm for working in a fast-paced environment focused on API and AI connectivity.
Tech Stack
Categories
Solutions Engineering
About Kong
Kong builds an open-source and commercial platform for API and AI connectivity, including Kong Gateway, Kong Konnect, and service mesh tools (Kuma/Kong Mesh) to secure, manage, and observe APIs and LLM traffic across clouds. It sells subscriptions and cloud services for API lifecycle management, security, and traffic governance to enterprises and platform teams. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Francisco, Kong is privately held.