---
title: 'Staff Product Manager, AI Management at Kong'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-product-manager-ai-management-kong-milan-93kjk9g4d28y'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-18'
---

# Staff Product Manager, AI Management at Kong

- **Company:** [Kong](https://feeny.ai/companies/kong)
- **Location:** Milan, Italy
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-17
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-18
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kong/f76de596-c105-4e6a-b642-b87e13409424

## 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 building the future of AI connectivity, empowering developers to connect, secure, govern, and scale their AI applications with speed and intelligence. Kong's AI Management solution – including our flagship AI Gateway – is one of our most strategic and fastest-growing product areas, and we're growing the team to match. We're looking for a Staff Product Manager to join the AI Management product team, based in our Milan office. You'll be the product owner for some of our most exciting, fastest-growing agentic AI management and infrastructure products. You'll work in close partnership with the broader AI Management research & development team, with a focus on driving definition and delivery of features and cross-team product work, collaborating with product managers and engineers around the world, while also supporting the field activities, including product marketing, sales, and enablement. This is a high-impact, hands-on product management role that reports directly to our Director & Head of AI Products.

What You’ll Own:

- AI Management Product Modules: Own the product direction for AI Management product modules that help connect, govern, supervise, and optimize agentic AI, including models, context, agentic harnesses, guardrails, evaluation, policies, and more. You'll define requirements, write specs, prioritize the backlog, and drive delivery of your module’s features in close collaboration with engineering.
- Cross-Product Infrastructure & Dependencies: Drive the cross-product work that connects your AI Management modules to other modules within AI Management, as well as Kong’s broader platform. You'll navigate shared roadmaps, negotiate priorities across teams, and ensure AI Gateway's infrastructure needs aren't blocked by cross-team complexity.
- Roadmap & Delivery: Own a clearly defined product roadmap for your areas, balancing new feature development against technical debt, infrastructure work, and platform dependencies. You'll partner with engineering leads to scope work, make trade-off decisions, and maintain a reliable delivery cadence.
- Stakeholder Communication: Serve as the connective tissue between engineering, design, product marketing, and leadership for your areas of ownership. Keep stakeholders informed, surface risks early, and ensure alignment across time zones and teams.
- Field Support: Support regional field activities as needed — such as customer-facing calls, product marketing input, or sales enablement — particularly where your proximity in Shanghai and knowledge of the runtime add value.

You’ll Thrive in This Role If You:

- Have 7-10 years of product management experience, with a track record of owning and shipping technical products — ideally in agentic AI, infrastructure, developer tools, and/or platform software.
- Have experience driving product delivery across distributed teams — you're comfortable working across time zones, navigating dependencies between teams, and keeping things moving without having direct authority over every contributor.
- Are strong at translating ambiguous technical problems into clear product requirements — you can take a messy infrastructure challenge, break it down, and turn it into a spec that engineering can execute against.
- Communicate clearly and proactively — you'll be the bridge between globally distributed stakeholders, across multiple functions and levels of seniority, so strong written and verbal communication in both languages is essential.
- Have solid project management instincts — you may not be a full-time project manager, but you know how to track work, surface blockers, and keep a roadmap on track without being asked.
- Are comfortable engaging with technical depth — you don't need to write code, but you should be able to hold your own in conversations about MCP servers, transport protocols, request routing, data plane architecture, and infrastructure trade-offs.
- Bonus: Direct experience with agentic AI development and products, including AI agents, AI gateways, and related infrastructure (e.g. LLM routing, AI observability, prompt management & guardrails, MCP servers, A2A, and various cost and quality optimizations).
- Bonus: Familiarity with enterprise platform engineering and infrastructure, including data planes, control planes, Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, and/or platform engineering workflows.

## #LI-JF1

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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