Staff Solutions Engineer

About the role

As a Staff Solutions Engineer at Kong, you will serve as a trusted technical advisor helping enterprises architect secure and scalable API ecosystems. You will sit at the intersection of API management and AI connectivity, guiding customers through the transition into the agentic AI era. This role involves supporting field sales, leading technical validations, and driving the technical strategy for complex enterprise deals.

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.
• Support POCs throughout the entire evaluation process, owning technical validation and stakeholder alignment.
• Collaborate with support, product, and engineering teams to advocate for customer needs.
• Lead and support API Management and AI Governance evaluations, including scoping API/AI use cases and LLM traffic management.
• Deliver demonstrations of Kong’s API and AI governance and agentic connectivity capabilities.
• Run API and AI-focused Technical Feasibility Workshops to validate Kong’s fit for modern architectures.
• Mentor and coach junior SEs on technical skills, discovery methods, and deal strategy.

Required skills

• SaaS
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Cloud-native platforms
• REST APIs
• GraphQL
• CI/CD
• OAuth2
• OIDC
• mTLS
• AI-assisted development
• LLM architectures
• Model Context Protocol

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering and/or solutions engineering experience at a SaaS, open source, or enterprise software company

About the Company

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and AI-native startups, 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.