Senior Solutions Engineer — API & AI Connectivity

Kong Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is seeking a Staff Solutions Engineer in the United States to own complex, enterprise-level deals and architect secure, scalable API ecosystems with agentic AI considerations.

You will mentor junior SEs, collaborate with product and engineering teams, and drive technical strategy across multiple stakeholders while delivering demonstrations and technical workshops.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software or solutions engineering in a SaaS, open source, or enterprise software company.
• Proven track record owning complex, enterprise-level deals with multiple technical and executive stakeholders.
• Experience mentoring or coaching other SEs or technical team members.
• Hands‑on experience with AI‑assisted development tooling — Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex, or equivalent.

Responsibilities

• Support field sales in helping customers understand the value of the Kong API and AI connectivity platform.
• Conduct discovery conversations to understand customer requirements and map them to Kong solutions, from initial product reviews through to production.
• Support POCs throughout the entire evaluation process, owning technical validation and stakeholder alignment.
• Ensure customer satisfaction across your assigned set of accounts.
• Collaborate with support, product, and engineering teams to advocate for customer needs.
• Create technical documentation for DevOps, implementations, and services engagements.
• Lead and support API Management and AI Goverance evaluations, including scoping API/AI use cases, LLM traffic management, and governance requirements.
• Deliver demonstrations of Kong’s API & AI governance and agentic connectivity capabilities, including Model Context Protocol (MCP) governance, semantic caching, prompt guardrails, and shadow AI detection.
• Run API & AI-focused Technical Feasibility Workshops (TFWs) to validate Kong’s fit for modern and/or AI/agentic architectures.
• Own the technical strategy for complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise deals from qualification through close.
• Mentor and coach junior SEs on technical skills, discovery methods, and deal strategy.
• Drive thought leadership by authoring technical blogs, hosting webinars, speaking at industry events and conferences such as AWS re:Invent, Google Next, API & AI summit, and regional events
• Influence product direction by synthesizing customer feedback and market signals into actionable input for the product team.

Skills

Docker

Kubernetes

REST APIs

GraphQL

CI/CD

API security

AI tooling

Communication

Tools

Claude Code

GitHub Copilot

OpenAI Codex

Job description

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is seeking a Staff Solutions Engineer in the United States to own complex, enterprise-level deals and architect secure, scalable API ecosystems with agentic AI considerations.

You will mentor junior SEs, collaborate with product and engineering teams, and drive technical strategy across multiple stakeholders while delivering demonstrations and technical workshops.