Sr. Practice Manager - Professional Services

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 a Senior Practice Manager to join the growing Professional Services team at Kong. As a Sr. Practice Manager,  you will have the opportunity to work across the entire customer lifecycle and lead the regional professional services team(Architects and Engineers) to drive prescriptive outcomes for Kong customers. You will be responsible for success across the defined install base to drive adoption, consumption, customer satisfaction, expansion and ensure team growth and development.  

Practice Manager will ensure our customers are getting the most value out of Kong products. As a primary professional services contact and ambassador for our customers, the practice manager is a strategic long-term, relationship-based customer-facing role. Apart from driving key business metrics, the Practice Manager will also focus on practice building, growing, and evolving the team as well as driving day-to-day professional services business needs. 

This is an important role and requires someone with exceptional leadership,  organizational, communication skills and the ability to multitask, context switch, and manage the entire customer deployment lifecycle. This role also involves supporting various stakeholders(Sales, Pre Sales, Customer Success, Product, Engineering, Finance, RevOps, and others).  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:

• Across the defined regional customer base, engage with customer organizations (from Developers, Architects to C-level executives) to build the initial professional services direction, and oversee the customer success throughout the Kong deployment phase including the onboarding/adoption phase of the customer journey.
• Engage with Kong customers across the sales and pre-sales cycle to define overall implementation and deployment strategy to ensure success.
• Perform activities to gather scope and build prescriptive outcome-based proposals for immediate and long-term adoption. This will include negotiating MSAs, SOWs as well as partner agreements.
• 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.
• Responsible for achieving key business metrics such as PS Bookings, Team Utilization, Revenue Growth, Overall success, and satisfaction across the defined customer cohort.
• Identify, prioritize, and own resolution of internal and customer escalations & project risks, driving an effective resolution across technical, business, and executive stakeholders.
• Build a high-performing diverse team, hire the best talent, and lead from the front setting the team up for success. Build strong relationships across cross-functional teams at Kong.
• Engage routinely with the Kong Product, Engineering, and Sales team to build an overall strategy to drive adoption, innovation, and maturity in our engagement & delivery model.
• Strengthen Kong adoption and success across the defined regional customer install base by developing strong delivery partner executive relationships and awareness of partner delivery capabilities.
• And any additional tasks required by manager

What you will bring to Kong:

• Strong professional services leadership background and experience in the API/Open Source space would be an added advantage
• Experience overseeing service delivery in the enterprise IT delivery across a multi-million-dollar portfolio
• Deep experience in building and developing remote professional services teams including career growth planning, performance, and resource management
• 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, organizational, and changing business needs
• 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 can keep pace with constant change.