Kong
Staff Solutions Engineer - Central
$220K–$250K
Texas, United States · Remote · Staff · Full-time · Posted Oct 26, 2026
- Experience
- 7+ years.
About the job
Advises enterprise customers on Kong’s API and AI connectivity platform, leads technical evaluations and deal strategy, and supports adoption from discovery through production.
What you'll do
- Lead customer discovery, technical validation, demonstrations, and API/AI feasibility workshops for enterprise deals.
- Develop technical strategy for complex sales, support customer satisfaction, and communicate customer needs to internal teams.
- Mentor junior solutions engineers and contribute technical content and product feedback.
What they ask for
- 7+ years of software engineering and/or solutions engineering experience at a SaaS, open source, or enterprise software company.
- Track record owning complex enterprise deals with multiple technical and executive stakeholders; experience mentoring or coaching technical team members.
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, cloud-native platforms, APIs, CI/CD pipelines, and API security patterns.
- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tooling (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex, or equivalent) is required.
Nice to have
- Working knowledge of AI/LLM architectures and familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agentic AI patterns.
- Understanding of cloud computing trends and open source business models.
Pay
$220K – $250K (base salary)
Tools
Docker, Kubernetes, REST, GraphQL, CI/CD, OAuth2, OIDC, mTLS
AI focus
Leads customer evaluations and demonstrations for AI governance and agentic connectivity, including LLM traffic management, MCP governance, semantic caching, prompt guardrails, and shadow AI detection.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative