Role overview

Kong is building the connectivity layer for AI, enabling developers to connect, secure, govern, and scale AI applications. The AI Management solution, including the AI Gateway, is a strategic and fast-growing product area. You’ll join the AI Management product team in Milan as a Staff Product Manager, owning product direction for core modules that help manage and optimize agentic AI systems.

Key responsibilities

Own the product direction for AI Management modules that support connecting, governing, supervising, and optimizing agentic AI, including models, context, agentic harnesses, guardrails, evaluation, and policies.
Define product requirements, write specifications, prioritize the backlog, and drive feature delivery in close collaboration with engineering teams.
Drive cross-product infrastructure work that connects AI Management modules to each other and Kong’s broader platform, navigating shared roadmaps and resolving team dependencies.
Develop and own a clearly defined product roadmap that balances new feature development, technical debt, infrastructure work, and platform dependencies.
Serve as the connective tissue between engineering, design, product marketing, and leadership, keeping stakeholders informed and ensuring alignment across distributed teams.
Support field activities including customer-facing calls, product marketing collaboration, and sales enablement as needed.

Requirements

Seven to ten years of product management experience with a track record of owning and shipping technical products, ideally in agentic AI, infrastructure, developer tools, or platform software.
Demonstrated experience driving product delivery across distributed teams, comfortable navigating dependencies and maintaining progress without direct authority.
Strong ability to translate complex technical problems into clear product requirements and infrastructure challenges into executable specifications.
Clear and proactive communication skills in both written and verbal forms, capable of bridging globally distributed stakeholders across multiple functions and seniority levels.
Solid project management instincts including tracking work, surfacing blockers, and maintaining roadmap momentum.
Technical depth and comfort engaging with infrastructure concepts such as MCP servers, transport protocols, request routing, data plane architecture, and infrastructure trade-offs.

What makes this role worth considering

This is a high-impact, hands-on position reporting directly to the Director and Head of AI Products, giving you significant influence over one of Kong’s most strategic initiatives. You’ll work with a globally distributed team of engineers and product professionals while being based in Milan, contributing to products at the intersection of AI and infrastructure that serve Fortune 500 companies and AI-native startups.