Role overview

Kong is seeking a Director of Partner Operations to build and scale the operating model that supports its rapidly growing partner business. As a key member of the Revenue Operations team, you will own the end-to-end partner business infrastructure—from deal registration and attribution to payout mechanics—while bringing an AI-first approach to how partner operations run at the company.

Key responsibilities

Serve as the strategic and operational partner to the Ecosystem VP and Partner Sales leaders, running an AI-assisted operating cadence that includes forecast reviews, quarterly business reviews, and executive reporting with automated preparation.
Lead annual and quarterly planning for the partner organization, including targets, capacity, and coverage, while maximizing the impact of partner investments.
Own the rules governing partner deal registration, protection, sourcing, and crediting—including sourced versus influenced credit, lookback windows, and partner marketing credit distinctions—and encode them into systems and automated agents.
Define and manage how partner-touched leads and deals flow between sales development, partner sales development, and account executives, including routing, service level agreements, and prioritization across partner events, prospective partners, and deal registrations.
Collaborate with Deal Desk, Finance, and Legal to simplify partner deal structuring, discounting, and booking across resale, referral, and cloud marketplace channels.
Own Kong’s cloud marketplace operations across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, including listings, private offers, and co-sell registration, plus lead marketplace launches in new regions.
Define and report partner key performance indicators, maintain partner data quality, and measure partner marketing effectiveness by linking marketing development funds and event spend to registered deals.
Build and maintain partner operations playbooks and enablement materials, ensuring consistent processes across partner onboarding, software access, and seller training.
Own the partner operations artificial intelligence and automation roadmap, identifying high-impact workflows, building or acquiring agents and automations, and measuring time returned to field teams.
Build a small team of artificial intelligence-native operators and drive cross-functional change across Sales, Marketing, Finance, Legal, and Customer Success as the ecosystem scales.

Requirements

Ten or more years of experience in partner operations, channel operations, revenue operations, or sales strategy and operations at business-to-business software-as-a-service or infrastructure software companies, including at least three years leading partner operations with direct ownership of deal registration, rules of engagement, and partner attribution.
Three or more years of experience operating a multi-type, multi-region partner ecosystem encompassing global system integrators, regional system integrators, resellers, distributors, independent software vendors, and hyperscalers.
Hands-on experience executing partner deals end to end, including resale, referral, and cloud marketplace transactions, partner discounting, and order form requirements, working in partnership with Deal Desk and Finance.
Three or more years leading partner planning including targets, quota, capacity, and coverage, plus experience designing channel-neutral crediting with incentive compensation teams.
Proven track record as a trusted advisor to vice president-level partner or sales leaders, with executive presence and sound judgment in establishing and evolving governance frameworks.
Deep Salesforce expertise including opportunity design, sourcing fields, and reporting, plus proficiency with partner relationship management and business intelligence tools and hands-on use of artificial intelligence tools to automate operations workflows.

What makes this role worth considering

This position offers the opportunity to shape how a high-growth company scales its partner operations at a pivotal moment, with the autonomy to design systems and processes from the ground up. You’ll work directly with senior leadership in revenue and ecosystem functions, making strategic decisions that directly impact company growth and partner success across multiple continents and business models.