Head of AI Connectivity Services

Openkrill; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong Inc. is seeking a Professional Services Manager to lead a team of Forward Deployed Engineers and Engagement Managers across the US Professional Services organization.

This leadership role focuses on outcomes, staffing, and growing the people who work directly with customer engineering teams daily. You will own the full engagement lifecycle for your book of business—staffing the right experts, meeting go-live dates, and ensuring technical quality while driving issue resolution for high‑risk

Qualifications

• 8+ years in customer-facing engineering, professional services, or platform engineering.
• 2+ years directly managing a technical, customer-facing team.
• Delivery leadership in API gateways, API management, integrations, or distributed systems platforms.
• Experience managing staffing, capacity, and prioritization across a portfolio of concurrent enterprise engagements.
• Strong Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure fluency.
• Experience with major cloud providers: AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Prior experience in API Management, Open Source, Middleware, SaaS, or Infrastructure software is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Delivery leadership

Team management

Enterprise engagements

Cloud-native principles

APIs / API management

Open Source / Middleware

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

Kong Inc. is seeking a Professional Services Manager to lead a team of Forward Deployed Engineers and Engagement Managers across the US Professional Services organization.

This leadership role focuses on outcomes, staffing, and growing the people who work directly with customer engineering teams daily. You will own the full engagement lifecycle for your book of business—staffing the right experts, meeting go-live dates, and ensuring technical quality while driving issue resolution for high‑risk