Senior Manager, Professional Services

About the Role

Kong is the connectivity layer of AI. We're a 6-time Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader and a Forrester Wave Leader, running in production at Fortune 500 scale. Every enterprise moving from "we're piloting AI" to "AI is in production" runs into the same wall: governance, security, and connectivity for a traffic pattern nobody built for. That's the opportunity in front of this team, and it's why Professional Services is one of the fastest-growing parts of this company right now.

We're hiring a Professional Services Manager to lead a team of Forward Deployed Engineers and Engagement Managers across Kong's US Professional Services organization. This is a leadership role, not a delivery role: you're directly responsible for delivery outcomes, staffing, and the growth of the people who sit hands-on with customer engineering teams every day.

You own the full engagement lifecycle for your book of business - staffing the right FDE and Engagement Manager on every account, holding the team to go-live dates and technical quality, and driving resolution personally on the highest-risk or highest-value accounts. You're operating at the intersection of people leadership, technical delivery, and enterprise account management, and you're judged on outcomes, not activity.

We want leaders who've done the implementation work themselves and now want to multiply that impact through a team: coach the engineers, coach the engagement managers, clear the blockers neither of them can clear alone, and build the delivery muscle that lets Kong keep pace with enterprise demand for API and AI connectivity.

You'll work daily with Solutions Architects, Sales, Customer Success, Product, and Product Engineering - scoping engagements correctly before they land on your team, and feeding what you learn in the field straight back into how Kong builds and sells.

This is a rare seat: AI connectivity is a land grab right now, and the person who builds this team's delivery model in the next 18 months owns a track record that doesn't come around twice.
Impact

Lead the team that turns Kong's platform into production reality for some of the world's largest enterprises - the ones deciding right now how AI gets governed, secured, and scaled across their business.
Growth

Build your leadership craft against the fastest-moving category in enterprise software: AI connectivity, cloud-native architecture, and distributed systems at Fortune 500 scale. Prove out this team's model and the case for more scope writes itself.
Opportunity

Join a Professional Services organization growing as fast as the AI adoption curve it's built to serve - market-leading credibility behind every conversation you walk into, and a direct hand in building the delivery model while it's still being written.

What You'll Do

• Manage and grow a team of Forward Deployed Engineers and Engagement Managers - hiring, coaching, career development, and performance management.
• Own delivery outcomes across your book of business: go-live dates, technical quality, and customer satisfaction. Report on them with the same rigor you'd demand from your team.
• Staff the right FDE and Engagement Manager to every engagement based on account complexity, technical scope, and team capacity.
• Be the senior escalation point on at-risk or high-complexity engagements - drive resolution and direct the team's response personally.
• Run your team's operating cadence: staffing reviews, at-risk reviews, 1:1s, and status reporting up to Professional Services leadership.
• Partner with Sales, Customer Success, and Solutions Architecture to scope new engagements accurately and take clean handoffs from pre-sale to delivery.
• Set and enforce delivery standards across your team - reusable accelerators, reference architectures, and best practices that outlive any single engagement.
• Feed what your team learns in the field back to Kong Product and Engineering - real customer signal shapes our roadmap.
• Lead your team's work on the strategic initiatives that matter most right now: AI connectivity, governance, platform modernization, and cloud-native transformation.

What You'll Bring
Experience

• 8+ years in customer-facing engineering, professional services, or platform engineering, including 2+ years directly managing a technical, customer-facing team.
• A track record of delivery leadership in API gateways, API management, integrations, or distributed systems platforms - deep enough that you can direct and evaluate your team's work, not just review it.
• Experience managing staffing, capacity, and prioritization across a portfolio of concurrent enterprise engagements.
• Strong Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure fluency - enough to unblock your team and hold your own with customer architects and executives.
• Experience with major cloud providers: AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Comfort directing and evaluating automation frameworks, deployment tooling, CI/CD pipelines, or migration tooling built by your team.
• Prior experience in API Management, Open Source, Middleware, SaaS, or Infrastructure software companies is a strong plus.

Preferred Attributes

• A decisive leadership mindset - you make the staffing and prioritization call and drive it to resolution without needing to do the work yourself.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving enterprise environments where the right call today beats the perfect call next week.
• A genuine passion for growing engineers and engagement managers into their next role - this job is measured in the careers you build, not just the accounts you save.
• Excellent communication across technical and executive audiences, internal and customer-facing.
• Highly organized, with strong prioritization and execution across a multi-account portfolio.
• Real enthusiasm for AI, modern infrastructure, and cloud-native technology - this team is living the shift, not reading about it.
• A strong sense of ownership for outcomes that aren't always fully in your control - that's the job.