Staff Product Manager, AI Management

**Are you ready to unlock intelligence?** 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. ## **The Mission** At Kong, we are building the future of AI connectivity, empowering developers to connect, secure, govern, and scale their AI applications with speed and intelligence. As a Staff Product Manager for AI Management, you will own the product direction for our fastest-growing agentic AI portfolio—including our flagship AI Gateway—serving as a critical strategic lever in the Agentic Era. You will bridge high-impact technical innovation with enterprise runtime governance, context management, and developer platform experience to turn APIs and AI connectivity into an organizational innovation factory. ## **What You’ll Do:** - Architect and execute the product vision and roadmap for AI Management modules, driving core capabilities around agentic harnesses, LLM routing, policies, context, guardrails, and evaluation. - Lead cross-departmental strategy as a multiplier across engineering, design, product marketing, and executive leadership to align shared roadmaps without operational friction. - Own the full lifecycle of your product modules by writing precise specs, prioritizing backlogs, and balancing new feature delivery against technical debt and platform dependencies. - Drive cross-product work connecting AI Management to Kong’s core platform infrastructure, enabling seamless data plane and control plane integration. - Speed up the clock on high-velocity delivery cadences in close partnership with engineering leads to scope work, navigate trade-offs, and accelerate time to market. - Support regional field activities, customer-facing technical engagements, and sales enablement to validate product-market fit and ensure developer delight. ## **What You’ll Bring:** - 7-10 years of technical product management experience owning and shipping technical products in developer tools, API platforms, or AI infrastructure. - Demonstrated ability to translate complex technical challenges—such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, request routing, data plane architectures, and transport trade-offs—into actionable product requirements. - Proven track record driving execution and managing dependencies across globally distributed R&D teams. - Strong written and verbal communication skills to articulate technical strategy across multiple functions and seniority levels. - Deep project management instincts to track work, surface blockers early, and keep cross-functional roadmaps on schedule. ## **The Kong DNA:** - Ownership: You act as a driver, not a passenger, holding yourself accountable for product outcomes, runtime performance, and customer success. - Urgency: You model speed and efficiency in everything you do, navigating the fast-paced pre-IPO landscape with grit and focus. - Collaboration: You lead like an API by working cross-functionally, breaking down silos, and building alignment across global teams. ## **Bonus Points:** - Direct experience with agentic AI development, including AI agents, AI gateways, LLM routing, AI observability, prompt management, guardrails, MCP servers, and A2A communications. - Familiarity with enterprise platform engineering, Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, control planes, and data planes. #LI-MP1 **About Kong:** Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong’s unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit [](http://www.konghq.com).