Senior Staff Product Manager, Kong Mesh and K8s

Are you ready to power the World's connections?

We are looking for a Senior Staff level Product Manager to lead our efforts in the Kubernetes world. This role covers our Kubernetes ingress controller, service mesh and growing our Kubernetes operator footprint. As this is a highly technical product, we are open to considering seasoned candidates interested in moving to product management from SRE, product engineering, or field engineering disciplines.

Kong is a fully distributed team with an HQ office in San Francisco. This role is remote and open to EMEA, Canada and US applicants. The role is eligible for work authorization sponsorship.

If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others.

Why will you enjoy this new opportunity?

Kubernetes is a strategic deployment target for Kong, with many customers already utilising the power that Kubernetes provides. This role involves maintaining and growing the usage of our existing products (Kong Mesh, Kong Ingress Controller, Kong Gateway Operator) in addition to innovating to bring new products to market for Kubernetes users.

Kong is a leader in the Kubernetes ecosystem, with multiple members of the team being key contributors to the Kubernetes Gateway API. Kong is not only standards compliant, we’re the ones driving the ecosystem forward.

Open source is important, but so is business. Kong is a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader (4 years in a row), and recently passed $100M ARR. If you join the team, you’ll be part of the rocket ship that is defining an industry.

What You'll Do:

• Make Kong the default choice for North/South and East/West traffic on Kubernetes.
• Build a data-informed product roadmap, defining priorities, and overseeing the success of features for our Kubernetes products.
• Work directly with customers to make them successful with our current features and get feedback on proposed roadmap items.
• Craft and implement go-to-market strategies, including field enablement and community feedback.
• Act as a technical advocate, delivering presentations and promoting Kong’s full-lifecycle API management capabilities.

What You'll Bring:

• Empathy, curiosity, and a willingness to try new things.
• 5+ years of software product management (or related) experience.
• The ability to get hands-on with Kubernetes and it’s ecosystem and debug when things don’t quite go to plan.
• A strong knowledge of API design, including breaking changes and how best to manage them with existing customers.
• Exceptional communication skills, capable of articulating complex technical concepts to a diverse range of stakeholders.
• Adaptability and agility in a fast-paced and evolving technology landscape, with a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies.

About Kong: 

Kong is THE cloud native API platform with the fastest, most adopted API gateway in the world (over 300m downloads!). Loved by developers and trusted with enterprises’ most critical traffic volumes, Kong helps startups and Fortune 500 companies build with confidence – allowing them to bring solutions to market faster with API and service connectivity that scales easily and securely. 

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 Twitter.

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.