Senior Manager, Professional Services

Overview

Lead a team of Field Engineers and Engagement Managers delivering Kong's API and AI connectivity platform to enterprise customers across the US Professional Services organization.

What you'll do

• Manage and grow a team of Field Engineers and Engagement Managers, including hiring, coaching, career development, and performance management.
• Own delivery outcomes across your book of business, including go-live dates, technical quality, and customer satisfaction, and report on them.
• Staff the right Field Engineer and Engagement Manager to every engagement based on account complexity, technical scope, and team capacity.
• Act as the senior escalation point on at-risk or high-complexity engagements and direct the team's response personally.
• Run your team's operating cadence, including staffing reviews, at-risk reviews, 1:1s, and status reporting 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, including reusable accelerators, reference architectures, and best practices.
• Feed what your team learns in the field back to Kong Product and Engineering.
• Lead your team's work on strategic initiatives such as AI connectivity, governance, platform modernization, and cloud-native transformation.

What you'll need

• 8+ years in customer-facing engineering, professional services, or platform engineering.
• 2+ years directly managing a technical, customer-facing team.
• Track record of delivery leadership in API gateways, API management, integrations, or distributed systems platforms, deep enough to direct and evaluate your team's work.
• 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.
• Comfort directing and evaluating automation frameworks, deployment tooling, CI/CD pipelines, or migration tooling built by your team.

Nice to have

• Prior experience in API Management, Open Source, Middleware, SaaS, or Infrastructure software companies.
• A decisive leadership mindset, making staffing and prioritization calls and driving them to resolution.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-moving enterprise environments.
• A genuine passion for growing engineers and engagement managers into their next role.
• Excellent communication across technical and executive audiences, internal and customer-facing.
• Highly organized, with strong prioritization and execution across a multi-account portfolio.
• Real enthusiasm for AI, modern infrastructure, and cloud-native technology.
• A strong sense of ownership for outcomes that aren't always fully in your control.

Details

• Location: New York, United States.
• Role covers Kong's US Professional Services organization.