Staff Product Manager, AI Management

Kong; Lombardia; On-site; EUR 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong is hiring a Staff Product Manager to lead AI Management product modules in Milan. You’ll own the direction for agentic AI features and infrastructure, collaborating with engineers worldwide to define requirements and drive delivery.

This high‑impact role reports to the Director & Head of AI Products and covers cross‑team roadmaps, stakeholder communication, and field support to help customers. Strong technical depth and experience across time zones are essential.

Qualifications

• 7–10 years of product management experience shipping technical products.
• Experience coordinating across distributed teams across time zones.
• Ability to translate ambiguous infra problems into clear specs.
• Strong written and verbal communication across languages.
• Familiarity with MCP servers, transport protocols and data plane architecture.
• Bonus: experience with agentic AI development and AI gateways.
• Bonus: enterprise platform engineering and Kubernetes familiarity.

Responsibilities

• Own the product direction for AI Management modules and drive delivery in collaboration with engineering.
• Manage cross‑product infrastructure and dependencies to connect modules within AI Management and Kong's platform.
• Own a clearly defined roadmap for your areas, balancing new features with technical debt and platform dependencies.
• Serve as the conduit between engineering, design, marketing, and leadership for your domains.
• Provide field support including customer calls and sales enablement where your proximity adds value.

Skills

Product management

Agentic AI

Infrastructure

Cross-team collaboration

Technical depth discussion

Tools

Kubernetes

Cloud-native architectures

MCP servers

Job description

About The Role

Kong is building the future of AI connectivity, empowering developers to connect, secure, govern, and scale their AI applications with speed and intelligence. Kong's AI Management solution – including our flagship AI Gateway – is one of our most strategic and fastest-growing product areas, and we're growing the team to match.

We’re looking for a Staff Product Manager to join the AI Management product team, based in our Milan office. You’ll be the product owner for some of our most exciting, fastest-growing agentic AI management and infrastructure products.

You’ll work in close partnership with the broader AI Management research & development team, with a focus on driving definition and delivery of features and cross‑team product work, collaborating with product managers and engineers around the world, while also supporting the field activities, including product marketing, sales, and enablement. This is a high‑impact, hands‑on product management role that reports directly to our Director & Head of AI Products.

What You’ll Do

• AI Management Product Modules: Own the product direction for AI Management product modules that help connect, govern, supervise, and optimize agentic AI, including models, context, agentic harnesses, guardrails, evaluation, policies, and more. You’ll define requirements, write specs, prioritize the backlog, and drive delivery of your module’s features in close collaboration with engineering.
• Cross‑Product Infrastructure & Dependencies: Drive the cross‑product work that connects your AI Management modules to other modules within AI Management, as well as Kong’s broader platform. You’ll navigate shared roadmaps, negotiate priorities across teams, and ensure AI Gateway’s infrastructure needs aren’t blocked by cross‑team complexity.
• Roadmap & Delivery: Own a clearly defined product roadmap for your areas, balancing new feature development against technical debt, infrastructure work, and platform dependencies. You’ll partner with engineering leads to scope work, make trade‑off decisions, and maintain a reliable delivery cadence.
• Stakeholder Communication: Serve as the connective tissue between engineering, design, product marketing, and leadership for your areas of ownership. Keep stakeholders informed, surface risks early, and ensure alignment across time zones and teams.
• Field Support: Support regional field activities as needed — such as customer‑facing calls, product marketing input, or sales enablement — particularly where your proximity in Shanghai and knowledge of the runtime add value.

You’ll Thrive In This Role If You

• Have 7–10 years of product management experience, with a track record of owning and shipping technical products — ideally in agentic AI, infrastructure, developer tools, and/or platform software.
• Have experience driving product delivery across distributed teams — you’re comfortable working across time zones, navigating dependencies between teams, and keeping things moving without having direct authority over every contributor.
• Are strong at translating ambiguous technical problems into clear product requirements — you can take a messy infrastructure challenge, break it down, and turn it into a spec that engineering can execute against.
• Communicate clearly and proactively — you’ll be the bridge between globally distributed stakeholders, across multiple functions and levels of seniority, so strong written and verbal communication in both languages is essential.
• Have solid project management instincts — you may not a full‑time project manager, but you know how to track work, surface blockers, and keep a roadmap on track without being asked.
• Are comfortable engaging with technical depth — you don’t need to write code, but you should be able to hold your own in conversations about MCP servers, transport protocols, request routing, data plane architecture, and infrastructure trade‑offs.
• Bonus: Direct experience with agentic AI development and products, including AI agents, AI gateways, and related infrastructure (e.g. LLM routing, AI observability, prompt management & guardrails, MCP servers, A2A, and various cost and quality optimizations).
• Bonus: Familiarity with enterprise platform engineering and infrastructure, including data planes, control planes, Kubernetes, cloud‑native architectures, and/or platform engineering workflows.

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 www.konghq.com.