Role overview

Kong is seeking a Staff Product Manager to lead the AI Management portfolio, including the flagship AI Gateway product. You will own the product direction for Kong’s fastest-growing agentic AI offerings, bridging technical innovation with enterprise governance and developer experience to help organizations connect, secure, and scale their AI applications.

Key responsibilities

Architect and execute the product vision and roadmap for AI Management modules, including agentic harnesses, LLM routing, policies, context management, guardrails, and evaluation capabilities.
Lead cross-departmental strategy across engineering, design, product marketing, and executive leadership to align shared roadmaps and eliminate organizational friction.
Own the complete product lifecycle by writing detailed specifications, prioritizing backlogs, and managing the balance between new feature delivery, technical debt, and platform dependencies.
Drive cross-product initiatives connecting AI Management to Kong’s core platform infrastructure, enabling seamless integration across data plane and control plane systems.
Partner closely with engineering leaders to scope work, navigate trade-offs, and maintain high-velocity delivery cadences while accelerating time to market.
Engage directly with customers and regional field teams to validate product-market fit, support sales enablement, and ensure developer satisfaction.

Requirements

Seven to ten years of technical product management experience building and shipping products in developer tools, API platforms, or AI infrastructure.
Demonstrated ability to translate complex technical concepts—such as Model Context Protocol servers, request routing, data plane architectures, and transport trade-offs—into clear product requirements.
Proven success driving execution and managing dependencies across globally distributed research and development teams.
Strong written and verbal communication skills to convey technical strategy effectively to stakeholders at all organizational levels.
Deep project management capabilities to track progress, identify blockers early, and maintain cross-functional roadmap schedules.
Experience with agentic AI development, AI gateways, LLM routing, AI observability, prompt management, guardrails, or MCP servers is advantageous.
Familiarity with enterprise platform engineering, Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, control planes, and data planes is a bonus.

What makes this role worth considering

This position offers the opportunity to shape the future of AI connectivity at a stage when the agentic AI market is rapidly evolving. You will work with globally distributed teams in a fast-paced, pre-IPO environment that values ownership, speed, and cross-functional collaboration.