Kong
Staff Solutions Engineer
Illinois, United States, Remote. Posted 10 days ago
The role
A Staff Solutions Engineer acts as a technical advisor to help enterprises architect API ecosystems and navigate AI connectivity. You will support field sales, conduct technical validations, and lead evaluations for API management and AI governance.
What you will do
- Support field sales in helping customers understand the value of the Kong platform.
- Conduct discovery conversations to map customer requirements to Kong solutions.
- Support POCs through the evaluation process and own technical validation.
- Ensure customer satisfaction across assigned accounts.
- Collaborate with support, product, and engineering teams to advocate for customer needs.
- Create technical documentation for DevOps, implementations, and services engagements.
- Lead and support API Management and AI Governance evaluations.
- Deliver demonstrations of API and AI governance and agentic connectivity capabilities.
- Run Technical Feasibility Workshops to validate fit for modern or AI architectures.
- Own technical strategy for complex enterprise deals.
Required qualifications
- 7+ years of software engineering and/or solutions engineering experience at a SaaS, open source, or enterprise software company.
- Proven track record owning complex, enterprise-level deals with multiple technical and executive stakeholders.
- Experience mentoring or coaching other SEs or technical team members.
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-native platforms.
- Experience with REST and GraphQL APIs, CI/CD pipelines, and API security patterns (OAuth2, OIDC, mTLS).
- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tooling — Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex, or equivalent is required.
- Working knowledge of AI/LLM architectures, including model routing, rate limiting, semantic caching, and prompt governance.
- Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agentic AI patterns.
- Solid understanding of cloud computing trends and open source business models.
- Strong listener and communicator.
About the company
Kong Inc. is the AI Connectivity Company building the connectivity layer of AI. Their unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic.