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 a Senior 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.

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, and benefits.

• Drive the end-to-end engagement lifecycle 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.

• Engage with the presales team to position and drive PS for new opportunities.

• Collaborate with other cross-functional teams (Sales, Pre-Sales, Customer Success, Operations, and Resource Management) to work on offerings and proposals pertaining to professional services and other operational tasks such as reporting and invoicing.

• Prepare customer-facing and internal collateral such as solution presentations, blueprints, reusable artifacts, project plans, burnouts, 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 go-to person for sales and presales 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, 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 the manager.

What you will bring?

• 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 FinancialForceto 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, a 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.

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About Kong

Kong Inc., a leading developer of cloud API technologies, is on a mission to enable companies around the world to become “API-first” and securely accelerate AI adoption. Kong helps organizations globally — from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises — unleash developer productivity, build securely, and accelerate time to market. For more information about Kong, please visit www.konghq.com or follow us on X @thekonginc.