---
title: 'Staff Engagement Manager at Kong'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-engagement-manager-kong-california-dmxmf22b4bxn'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-06'
---

# Staff Engagement Manager at Kong

- **Company:** [Kong](https://feeny.ai/companies/kong)
- **Location:** California, United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-11-05
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-06
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kong/e639ad3b-1e47-497d-bcfa-08eb38138f64

## 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: We are looking for an Engagement Manager to join the growing Professional Services team at Kong. As an Engagement Manager, you will have the opportunity to work across the entire customer lifecycle to drive a prescriptive outcome(s) and successful delivery of engagements and programs for key customers. The engagement manager will ensure our customers are getting the most value out of Kong products and will help prepare, manage, and deliver strategic engagements across the defined install base. As a primary professional services contact and ambassador for our customers, the engagement manager is a strategic, long-term, relationship-based customer-facing role. Apart from driving successful delivery of services engagements, the Engagement Manager will focus on driving day to day professional services operations. This is an important role and requires someone with very strong thought organization, and communication skills along with the ability to multitask, context switch, and manage customer escalations. Working at Kong presents a unique opportunity to help customers modernize their approach to IT to embrace Cloud Native development principles.

What You'll Do: Customer Delivery

- Own and lead selected, simultaneous billable customer engagements and manage customer expectations and drive prescriptive outcomes during the entire customer lifecycle (Post Sales, Delivery, and Value Realization)
- Work with customers and stakeholders to understand and analyze engagement scope, requirements, time, cost, benefits, etc. Drive the engagement lifecycle end to end to deliver business outcomes
- Own and drive project management activities and oversee completion of engagement kickoffs, project charters, and deliverables, managing schedules, meeting milestones, and ensuring success throughout the engagement lifecycle end to end to deliver business outcomes
- Prepare customer-facing and internal collateral such as solution presentations, blueprints, reusable artifacts, project plans, burndown, and status reports
- Identify, prioritize, and own resolution of internal and customer escalations & project risks, driving an effective resolution across technical, business, and executive stakeholders

Makes use of productivity tools like FinancialForce, Salesforce, Metabase, Trello, etc. to maintain and manage programs of multiple onboarding and implementation projects along with reporting on key business metrics (Billings, Utilizations, Resource Capacity, and Forecasting)

Professional Services Operations

- Assist Services leadership team with resource assignment and management in Financial Force
- Ensure timely completion of Month and Quarter end close process and complete new PS employee onboarding with content tailored to the new hires’ positions
- Coordinate with cross functional teams to obtain relevant data about the project opportunity and staffing requirements
- Become a subject matter expert for services personnel on all processes related to services revenue: time entry, project management processes relate to operations, customer billing, and staff utilization
- Continually provide suggestions and implement improvements to business and reporting processes that keep up with the changes in the organization
- Support Professional Services staff to better understand revenue, hours, and target attainment goals

What You'll Bring:

- Strong project/program management and services delivery experience with a track record of delivery for strategic customers on time and within budget
- Deep experience working with project financial fundamentals and PSA tools such as Financial Force to own and drive operational activities(Reporting, Forecasting, and Tracking)
- Excellent customer-facing skills and ability to communicate with executives as well as other stakeholders at customer sites and cross-functionally within Kong. Ability to demonstrate relationship building internally and externally
- Exceptional organizational and change management skills with an ability to manage competing client demands
- Excellent presentation skills along with a strong understanding of professional services business metrics in a SaaS software environment. Ability to manage critical and political situations with business stakeholders with strong interpersonal skills
- Proven team player, and team builder who loves to work in a fast-growing and roll up their sleeves in a dynamic environment and is able to keep pace with constant change

## #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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