Kong

Staff Solutions Engineer - AI Specialist

San Francisco, California, United States, Remote. Posted 19 days ago

The role

A Staff Solutions Engineer will act as a technical advisor to help enterprises architect API ecosystems and navigate the transition into the agentic AI era. You will support field sales, conduct discovery, lead technical validations, and deliver demonstrations of Kong's API and AI connectivity capabilities.

What you will do

  • 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.
  • 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 Kong's API & AI governance and agentic connectivity capabilities.
  • Run API & AI-focused Technical Feasibility Workshops.
  • Own the technical strategy for complex, multi-stakeholder 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.