Staff Engagement Manager

Kong; New Jersey; Hybrid; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong is seeking an Engagement Manager to join its Professional Services team in New Jersey. This role involves leading customer engagements to drive successful outcomes throughout the customer lifecycle. The ideal candidate will possess strong project management and interpersonal skills, ensuring customers maximize value from Kong products. Key responsibilities include managing project scopes, delivering customer solutions, and handling escalations. Join Kong to modernize IT approaches for Cloud Native development.

Qualifications

• Strong project/program management experience with a track record for strategic customers.
• Deep experience with PSA tools and operational activities.
• Excellent customer-facing skills and relationship building ability.

Responsibilities

• Own and lead simultaneous customer engagements.
• Work with stakeholders to define engagement scope and deliverables.
• Manage escalations and project risks effectively.

Skills

Project management

Customer delivery

Interpersonal skills

Relationship building

Organizational skills

Tools

Salesforce

FinancialForce

Trello

Metabase

Job description

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.

About the role:

We are looking for an Engagement Manager to join the growing Professional Services team at Kong. As an Engagement Manager, you will have the opportunity to work across the entire customer lifecycle to drive prescriptive outcomes and successful delivery of engagements and programs for key customers.

The engagement manager will ensure our customers are getting the most value out of Kong products and will help prepare, manage, and deliver strategic engagements across the defined install base. As a primary professional services contact and ambassador for our customers, the engagement manager is a strategic, long‑term, relationship‑based customer‑facing role. Apart from driving successful delivery of services engagements, the Engagement Manager will focus on driving day to day professional services operations.

This is an important role and requires someone with very strong thought organization, and communication skills along with the ability to multitask, context switch, and manage customer escalations. Working at Kong presents a unique opportunity to help customers modernize their approach to IT to embrace Cloud Native development principles.

What we are looking for:

• Customer Delivery
  • Own and lead selected, simultaneous billable customer engagements and manage customer expectations and drive prescriptive outcomes during the entire customer lifecycle (Post Sales, Delivery, and Value Realization).
  • Work with customers and stakeholders to understand and analyze engagement scope, requirements, time, cost, benefits, etc. Drive the engagement lifecycle end to end to deliver business outcomes.
  • Own and drive project management activities and oversee completion of engagement kickoffs, project charters, and deliverables, managing schedules, meeting milestones, and ensuring success throughout the engagement lifecycle end to end to deliver business outcomes.
  • Prepare customer‑facing and internal collateral such as solution presentations, blueprints, reusable artifacts, project plans, burndowns, and status reports.
  • Identify, prioritize, and own resolution of internal and customer escalations & project risks, driving an effective resolution across technical, business, and executive stakeholders.
  • Makes use of productivity tools like FinancialForce, Salesforce, Metabase, Trello, etc. to maintain and manage programs of multiple onboarding and implementation projects along with reporting on key business metrics (Billings, Utilizations, Resource Capacity, and Forecasting).
• Professional Services Operations
  • Assist Services leadership team with resource assignment and management in Financial Force.
  • Ensure timely completion of Month and Quarter end close process and complete new PS employee onboarding with content tailored to the new hires’ positions.
  • Coordinate with cross functional teams to obtain relevant data about the project opportunity and staffing requirements.
  • Become a subject matter expert for services personnel on all processes related to services revenue: time entry, project management processes related to operations, customer billing, and staff utilization.
  • Continually provide suggestions and implement improvements to business and reporting processes that keep up with the changes in the organization.
  • Support Professional Services staff to better understand revenue, hours, and target attainment goals.

What you will bring to Kong:

• Strong project/program management and services delivery experience with a track record of delivery for strategic customers on time and within budget.
• Deep experience working with project financial fundamentals and PSA tools such as Financial Force to own and drive operational activities (Reporting, Forecasting, and Tracking).
• Excellent customer‑facing skills and ability to communicate with executives as well as other stakeholders at customer sites and cross‑functionally within Kong. Ability to demonstrate relationship building internally and externally.
• Exceptional organizational and change management skills with an ability to manage competing client demands.
• Excellent presentation skills along with a strong understanding of professional services business metrics in a SaaS software environment. Ability to manage critical and political situations with business stakeholders with strong interpersonal skills.
• Proven team player, and team builder who loves to work in a fast‑growing and roll up their sleeves in a dynamic environment and is able to keep pace with constant change.

About Kong:

Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.