---
title: 'Director, Performance Marketing at Kong'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/director-performance-marketing-kong-san-francisco-fms6npjwrsg4'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-16'
---

# Director, Performance Marketing at Kong

- **Company:** [Kong](https://feeny.ai/companies/kong)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $171k–$275k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-13
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-16
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kong/8c606908-c786-4f50-91f5-2a859e8854e8

## Job description

Are you ready to unlock intelligence? 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: Kong is looking for a Director, Performance Marketing to lead and scale our global performance marketing engine. This role will own Performance Marketing strategy, budget, investment allocation, forecasting, and paid acquisition outcomes across channels, audiences, and regions. You'll be accountable for translating investment into qualified demand, pipeline, and measurable return, continuously determining where to scale, optimize, reallocate, or pull back investment. This is a hands-on leadership role. We're looking for someone who can set strategy and own the numbers while staying close to the channels, data, and execution. You'll lead agency partners, work closely across Marketing, Sales, Finance, and RevOps, and regularly translate performance into clear recommendations for senior leadership.

What You'll Do:

- Own Performance Marketing targets and strategy: Build and execute the global roadmap required to deliver paid acquisition, qualified demand, pipeline, efficiency, and ROAS goals.
- Own the Performance Marketing budget: Lead budget planning, forecasting, pacing, and allocation across channels, audiences, regions, and GTM priorities. Continuously make disciplined decisions to scale, optimize, reallocate, or pull back investment based on business impact.
- Lead Paid Search & Paid Social: Set channel strategy and ensure best-in-class execution, experimentation, optimization, and measurement across our core paid acquisition channels.
- Turn data into investment decisions: Connect spend and channel performance to Responses/INQs → Qualified Demand → Pipeline → ROAS and use those signals to determine where the next dollar should go.
- Build a high-velocity experimentation engine: Drive testing across audiences, creative, offers, bidding, channels, conversion paths, and emerging acquisition opportunities.
- Leverage AI to scale performance: Use AI and automation to accelerate analysis, campaign optimization, creative testing, audience development, experimentation, and operational efficiency.
- Build internal performance capability: Lead and develop channel specialists while establishing clear operating rhythms, standards, and accountability across the function.
- Lead agency strategy: Own agency relationships and determine where external partners provide differentiated expertise, specialized capabilities, or incremental execution capacity.
- Communicate performance to leadership: Deliver clear, concise performance narratives and investment recommendations to Marketing and company leadership, translating complex channel and funnel data into business implications, risks, opportunities, and actions.
- Lead cross-functionally: Partner across Global Campaigns, Digital Experience, Product Marketing, RevOps, Finance, Sales, and regional teams to align priorities and translate GTM objectives into effective investment and execution.

How We'll Measure Success: You'll be accountable for the business performance and efficiency of Performance Marketing, including:

- Paid-attributed qualified demand and pipeline
- ROAS and return on investment
- Acquisition efficiency
- Performance against investment forecasts and budget
- Effective allocation and reallocation of spend
- Experiment velocity and incremental performance
- Paid Search and Paid Social performance

Success also means building a trusted Performance Marketing function that can clearly communicate where we're investing, what's working, what isn't, and where the next dollar should go.

What You'll Bring:

- 10+ years of experience across Performance Marketing, Growth Marketing, Paid Media, Demand Generation, or related B2B SaaS disciplines, including experience leading a performance function
- Deep expertise across Paid Search and Paid Social, with strong knowledge of modern B2B acquisition and measurement
- Demonstrated ownership of significant global media budgets, including annual planning, forecasting, pacing, allocation, and in-quarter reallocation
- Strong financial and analytical orientation with the ability to connect investment decisions to qualified demand, pipeline, revenue, and ROI—not just platform metrics
- A track record of building rigorous experimentation and optimization programs and translating learnings into investment decisions
- Experience building and developing high-performing internal teams while effectively leveraging agencies and external partners
- Hands-on understanding of modern advertising platforms, analytics, attribution, automation, and AI-enabled performance tools
- Exceptional executive communication and storytelling skills, with experience presenting performance, investment recommendations, risks, and business outcomes to senior leadership
- Demonstrated ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders, build alignment across teams with different priorities, and drive execution
- A strong operator mentality with the ability to move fluidly between strategy, financial management, analysis, team leadership, and execution
- Experience in developer, infrastructure, API, cloud, or technical B2B SaaS strongly preferred

## #LI-KH1

About Kong: Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong’s unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit [www.konghq.com](http://www.konghq.com).

## About Kong

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Kong provides a unified API and AI platform that connects, secures, and manages APIs, events, and AI agents for modern architectures.
- **Entity Type**: Private – Series E, post‑money valuation $2B (2023)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2017 (company formalized; roots as Mashape go back to 2009)
- **Founders**: Augusto “Aghi” Marietti (CEO) and Marco Palladino (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: API management, AI connectivity, cloud infrastructure
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises, platform engineering teams, developers, and product managers building API‑driven or AI‑agent applications
- **Mission / Purpose**: To be the AI connectivity company – enabling organizations to connect, govern, and monetize APIs, events, and AI workloads at scale.

## Products & Services
- **[Kong Konnect](https://konghq.com/)**: Managed, unified API and AI platform covering the full lifecycle – design, test, publish, govern, monetize – across any cloud or environment. SaaS.
- **[Kong Gateway](https://konghq.com/)**: Open‑source (and enterprise) API gateway, the world’s most adopted, used for traffic management, security, and observability. Open‑source hybrid.
- **[Kong AI Gateway](https://konghq.com/)**: Extension for managing and securing AI traffic – token consumption, cost control, and agent governance. SaaS / add‑on.
- **[Kong Mesh](https://konghq.com/)**: Enterprise service mesh for Kubernetes and VMs (based on Kuma, donated to CNCF). Infrastructure.
- **[Insomnia](https://konghq.com/)**: API design and testing tool (acquired and integrated into the Kong ecosystem). Desktop / CLI.
- **[OpenMeter](https://konghq.com/)**: Usage‑based billing, entitlements, and invoicing for APIs, events, and AI (acquired 2025). SaaS.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: $2 billion (as of late 2023 Series E round) – not publicly traded.
- **Key Metric**: Surpassed **$100M ARR** in late 2023; processes **+1 trillion API/AI requests per day**; **600+ employees** in 25+ countries (LinkedIn reports 738 employees with +23.5% YoY growth).
- **Total Funding**: **$344.1M** across 6 rounds (including Series D $100M at $1.4B, and Series E $175M led by new investors).
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Include large institutional investors; partners include cloud providers and enterprises such as United Airlines (cited as customer). Open‑source community with 182K+ community users.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Most adopted open‑source API gateway** – strong developer mindshare and large community.
- **Unified platform** covering the entire API lifecycle plus AI agent management, reducing fragmentation for enterprises.
- **High‑performance, low‑latency** – proven at hyper‑volume (+1T requests/day), 99.99% availability SLA.
- **Strategic acquisitions** (Kuma, Insomnia, OpenMeter) that plug gaps in service mesh, developer tooling, and usage‑based billing.
- **Strong enterprise DNA** – trusted by global brands for mission‑critical applications.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI connectivity** – building the layer to manage LLM traffic, agent security, token cost, and real‑time data streams.
- **Monetization** – enabling customers to monetize APIs and AI consumption (chargeback, entitlements, pricing).
- **Developer productivity** – accelerating onboarding and reducing costs (claims 15% faster development, 57% operational cost reduction).
- **Global scale** – growing remote workforce and entering new geographic markets (e.g., Italy, ANZ roles posted).

## Why Work Here
- **Remote‑first culture** – 600+ employees across 25+ countries; strong emphasis on global collaboration.
- **Perks & benefits** (from [careers page](https://konghq.com/company/careers)):
  - Stock options for most employees
  - 4‑week paid sabbatical every 5 years
  - Flexible time off
  - Home office stipend
  - Regular “unplug days” (company‑wide long weekends)
  - Virtual events (Donut chats, trivia, fitness challenges)
- **Engineering culture** – values “owners, explorers, real, unstoppable” and encourages individual innovation. Focus on shipping fast and high trust.
- **Growth trajectory** – company is scaling (+23.5% headcount YoY) and is a unicorn with clear product‑market fit in a hot market (AI + API management).
- **Open roles** – 93 open positions across engineering, sales, solutions, customer success, and marketing.

## Sources
1. [konghq.com](https://konghq.com/)
2. [konghq.com/company/careers](https://konghq.com/company/careers)
3. [konghq.com/company/about-us](https://konghq.com/company/about-us)
4. [linkedin.com/company/konghq](https://www.linkedin.com/company/konghq)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/kong](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kong)

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