Senior Staff Product Manager, AI Gateway

Are you ready to power the World's connections?

Kong is building the future of API and AI infrastructure, empowering developers to connect, secure, and scale their applications with speed and intelligence. As a fast-growing and well-funded company, we take pride in our innovative products, happy customers, and strong values-driven culture.

As a Senior Staff Product Manager for Kong’s AI Gateway, you will lead one of our most strategic product bets. The AI Gateway is a first-of-its-kind infrastructure layer built to govern, secure, and accelerate GenAI adoption within modern enterprises. It is deeply aligned with how large-scale AI applications are evolving — toward agents, orchestration, and composable function architectures.

In this role, you will work closely with a world-class engineering team and partner directly with Kong’s CTO and co-founder to shape product direction. You will own the product end-to-end: from roadmap to execution, enterprise GTM, and customer success. This role spans deep technical work, strategic storytelling, and strong cross-functional execution across product, engineering, and field teams.

At Kong, you’ll operate in a small and high-impact environment where your decisions will shape how some of the world’s largest companies build with AI.

• Define and Drive Product Vision: Own and evolve the product vision for Kong’s AI Gateway — a critical infrastructure layer for governing and accelerating GenAI workloads. Collaborate with engineering, design, field teams, and Kong’s CTO to ensure strategic clarity and technical feasibility across agentic AI use cases.
• Lead Execution: Work closely with engineering and design leads to define and deliver high-impact capabilities across caching, routing, security, and observability for LLM-powered applications. Ensure each release delivers meaningful value to enterprise customers and reinforces Kong’s differentiated position in the AI ecosystem.
• Shape Customer-Driven Strategy: Develop a deep understanding of how enterprises are adopting LLMs, agents, and GenAI workflows. Use insights from strategic customers, market trends, and internal usage to guide prioritization and product-market fit. Validate concepts through design partners and MVP iterations.
• Ensure Cross-Functional Alignment: Align engineering, GTM, and platform stakeholders on priority use cases, customer deliverables, and field enablement. Drive alignment across core platform teams when AI Gateway intersects with Konnect, Kong Gateway, or new runtime capabilities like MCP.
• Build Roadmaps and Launch Plans: Own and maintain a public-facing roadmap and internal planning artifacts. Partner with Product Marketing and Enablement to ensure field readiness and a clear narrative around product capabilities, roadmap, and competitive differentiation.
• Drive Communication and Leadership Visibility: Proactively communicate progress, decisions, and risks to executive stakeholders — including Kong’s CTO and product leadership. Translate technical details into strategic implications, ensuring the broader organization understands the “why” behind roadmap bets.

• Experience: 8+ years of product management experience, including ownership of technical infrastructure or developer products at scale.
• Enterprise GTM Acumen: Proven success launching and growing enterprise-facing products — particularly those involving platform or middleware technologies. Comfort working across sales, marketing, and solution engineering to align roadmap with commercial goals.
• Technical Curiosity & Depth: Solid understanding of APIs, networking, middleware, or developer infrastructure. Familiarity with AI/ML concepts (e.g. LLMs, embeddings, prompt chaining) is preferred, though deep AI expertise is not required.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Confidence engaging with diverse stakeholders — from field engineers to enterprise customers to the CTO — and translating their inputs into clear requirements, use cases, and prioritization frameworks.
• Execution Excellence: Ability to break down complex initiatives into iterative milestones and drive high-quality execution in partnership with engineering and design leads.
• Communication & Clarity: Strong written and verbal communicator. Able to frame technical trade-offs clearly and influence decisions across levels

Kong has different base pay ranges for different work locations within the United States, which allows us to pay employees competitively and consistently in different geographic markets. Compensation varies depending on a wide array of factors, including but not limited to specific candidate location, role, skill set and level of experience. Certain roles are eligible for additional rewards including sales incentives depending on the terms of the applicable plan and role. Benefits may vary depending on location. US based employees are typically offered access to healthcare benefits, a 401(k) plan, short and long term disability benefits, basic life and AD&D insurance, among others. The typical base pay range for this role in the US is $177,030 - 221,287.

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 X. 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.