Are you ready to power the World's connections?
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:
You will be the leader of the engineering team that builds the Kong AI gateway, empowering companies and developers around the world to govern every step of their AI & LLM based innovation.
You will need strong technical leadership and a solid background in AI and LLM technologies, so you are able to technically challenge engineers and ensure that they keep growing, make valuable contributions, and generally have a great experience in Kong. You will have the opportunity to influence the culture, facilitate technical delivery, and work with your team on strategy and execution.
What you'll be doing:
- Hire, mentor, and maintain healthy Engineering teams who value collaboration and innovation.
- Manage shift scheduling, measuring key performance indicators (KPIs), and training, assure high-quality work and SLA.
- Experience managing customer-facing, engineering support roles and has a breadth of experience across infrastructure, internal tooling, platforms, and on-premise products.
- Solid technical expertise for AI and LLM in one or more of the following:
- APIs, models and consumption models for different providers
- Self-hosted models
- RAG and Vector Databases
- MCP
- Own the customer escalation system technically, including collaboration with other departments, stakeholders (Sales, Customer Experience, Sales Engineering etc.) and where necessary customers.
- Leadership experience displaying ability to organize and prioritize complex problem resolution and bug fixes, debugging distributed services.
- Organize and manage your teams to fit constructively into the org as a whole and help the company succeed.
- Set and manage expectations with other engineering teams, senior management, and external stakeholders.
- Give constructive feedback to Engineers, conduct 1:1s, address inter-personal issues, and conduct reviews.
What you'll bring:
- 5+ years of managing engineering teams and obsessing over
- customer experience
- Solid technical expertise for AI and LLM in one or more of the following:
- APIs, models and consumption models for different providers
- Self-hosted models
- RAG and Vector Databases
- MCP
- Experience doing reviews, hiring, comp
- Experience managing remote teams and distributed workforce
- Demonstrated leadership of Engineering teams
- On-premise, cloud and hybrid product background
- Proven customer relationship skills sets
- Business fluent English language skills both written and verbal
Bonus Points:
- Hands-on experience in building and maintaining NGINX/OpenResty backend services
- Experience working in an Enterprise Software company
- Experience working on Rust projects
About Kong:
Kong is THE cloud native API platform with the fastest, most adopted API gateway in the world (over 300m downloads!). As the innovation leader of cloud API technologies, Kong is on a mission to enable companies around the world to become "API-first" and securely accelerate AI adoption. Kong helps organizations globally - from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises - unleash developer productivity, build securely and accelerate to market.
83% of web traffic today is API calls! APIs are the connective tissue of the cloud and the underlying technology that allows software to talk and interact with one another. Therefore, we believe that APIs act as the nervous system of the cloud. Our audacious mission is to build the nervous system that will safely and reliably connect all of humankind!
For more information about Kong, please visit konghq.com or follow @thekonginc on Twitter. We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.