Engagement Manager

Are you ready to power the World's connections?

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 a prescriptive outcome(s) 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(Developers, Architects, and C Suite), 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 be working on defining new service offerings, evolving the delivery framework, driving account expansions along with building a world-class professional services team. 

This is an incredibly strategic role and requires someone with very strong thought leadership, organizational, and communication skills along with the ability to multitask, context switching, 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.

Why should you want to work at Kong?  

Market Opportunity - We are on a quest to build a $10b+ software company over the next few years and need YOUR help! Why APIs Matter? APIs have been enabling innovation for decades! Strong VC team, Series D, strong year over year revenue growth!

Technical Leadership - We are recognized as the leader in innovation in the connectivity space. Marco, our CTO/co-founder - “We are the Cisco of L4 and L7” - CUBE Conversation, March 2021 We are the leading innovator in the connectivity space!

Amazing Team & Culture - Come be a "Konger" and find out what we mean. Great Place to Work Certified in 2020 & 2021 Kong employees exemplify our culture at our 2022 Sales Kickoff 2022 Forbes Cloud 100 Honoree

Building Great Products - Learn why the world's largest companies love our tech! Kong Named in the Leaders Quadrant of the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for API Management for the Fourth Consecutive Year Over 250m+ downloads of our open source API gateway!  Over 40k+ stars on Github between Kong API and Kong Insomnia!

What we are looking for:

• Own and lead selected, simultaneous billable customer engagements and manage customer expectations and drive prescriptive outcomes during the entire customer lifecycle(Pre Sales to Post Sales, Delivery, and Value Realization)
• Work with customers (including up to 'C level') and stakeholders to understand and analyze engagement scope, requirements, time, cost, benefits, etc. Drive the engagement lifecycle end to end to deliver business outcomes
• Drive project management activities and oversee completion of engagement kickoffs, project charters, and deliverables, managing schedules, meeting milestones, and ensuring success throughout the engagement cycle
• Collaborate with other cross-functional teams(Sales, Pre Sales, Customer Success, Ops, Resource Management) to work on offerings, proposals containing Professional Services, and other operational tasks such as reporting, invoicing, etc.
• Prepare customer-facing and internal collateral such as solution presentations, blueprints, reusable artifacts, project plans, burnout, 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.
• Identify opportunities for new professional services by understanding and addressing potential new use cases. Articulate the business value in the upsell and/or extension of services
• Motivate, inspire, and mentor project team members to excel, and act as the GoTo person for Sales & Pre Sales to demonstrate Professional Services best practices and delivery framework
• Demonstrate the value of Professional Services externally and internally. Represents Professional Services within account planning sessions and is able to formulate PS strategy holistically
• Helps innovate tooling and processes to help mature and evolve our systems and processes
• Makes use of productivity tools like Financial Force, 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)
• And any additional tasks required by manager

What you will bring to Kong:

• 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
• 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 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, customer-centric attitude, and ability to deal with cultural diversity
• 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
• Ideally has prior experience working in the  Open Source space and/or API Management or other Middleware/SaaS software companies