Kong

Sr Technical Product Marketing Manager, AI Traffic Management & Registry at Kong (Colorado, United States)

Kong· Colorado, United States·

Role details

Work type
Remote
Employment
Full-Time

Kong at a glance

Kong runs the unified API and AI platform that connects, secures, governs, and monetizes APIs, events, and AI traffic.

Kong provides a unified API and AI platform. Its open-source Kong Gateway handles API traffic at the edge, while Kong Konnect adds a managed control plane to design, secure, observe, and monetize APIs, events, and AI requests across any cloud. The AI Gateway extends the same governance model to LLMs, MCP servers, and agents.

$345M raised · latest: Series E · $175M · 2024 (at $2B valuation) · backed by Tiger Global, Balderton, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures

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: Every enterprise deploying AI at scale faces the same challenge: governing an explosion of LLM, MCP, and agent traffic while giving developers a way to discover and consume AI resources safely. This role owns the technical narrative at the heart of that story. As Senior Technical PMM, you'll drive positioning, evangelism, and competitive strategy for Kong's AI traffic management capabilities — the AI gateway and guardrails that secure and control AI traffic in production — as well as our registry and discovery experience spanning AI, MCP, and agent registries. This is a core technical marketing role on the AI team, covering the most contested competitive ground in the market. What You’ll Do:

  • Own positioning and messaging for AI traffic management — define and evolve the technical narrative for Kong's AI gateway and guardrails capabilities, including LLM routing, policy enforcement, content safety, and multi-agent traffic governance
  • Drive the registry and discovery story — build positioning for AI, MCP, and agent registries, covering listing, registration, governance, and the developer discovery experience
  • Lead technical field enablement for your domain — own product enablement within your domain for Kong Solution Engineers, Customer Success Managers, and other technical field roles
  • Serve as technical evangelist — represent Kong at industry events, analyst briefings, webinars, and customer conversations; produce technical content including demos, blogs, whitepapers, and reference architectures
  • Produce deep technical content — build demos, reference architectures, technical whitepapers, and documentation-adjacent content that helps architects and security teams evaluate and adopt Kong's approach
  • Partner with product on roadmap narrative — work closely with product management to shape how new capabilities are framed, named, and sequenced for maximum market impact
  • Fuel launches and campaigns — deliver technical positioning, proof points, and demo assets as structured inputs to the AI PMM's launch and campaign motions
  • Mentor and elevate — as the senior-most technical PMM on the team, raise the bar for technical storytelling across the AI portfolio

What You'll Bring:

  • 7+ years of experience in product marketing, product management, or solutions engineering—ideally at an AI/ML platform company
  • Genuine hands-on interest in AI infrastructure: you follow developments in LLM deployment, agentic frameworks, Model Context Protocol, and AI governance; you can speak credibly to AI platform engineers without bluffing
  • Proven ability to translate complex technical concepts into crisp narratives that land with both technical practitioners and C-suite buyers
  • Highly collaborative—you thrive working across Product, Marketing, Sales, and Partner teams
  • Comfortable owning a stage: keynote presentations, analyst briefings, customer roundtables, and demo-heavy sessions are energizing, not intimidating
  • Experience in open-source software, SaaS platforms, and enterprise go-to-market motions strongly preferred
  • Familiarity with the AI connectivity landscape—including awareness of competing and complementary vendors across API gateways, AI observability, vector databases, IPaaS, and agentic orchestration frameworks—is a strong plus

#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.

Why work at Kong

  • Remote‑first culture – 600+ employees across 25+ countries; strong emphasis on global collaboration.
  • Perks & benefits (from careers page):
    • 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.

Application questions