Staff Solutions Engineer - West

What you'll do

• Map customer requirements to Kong solutions, support proofs of concept, and lead technical feasibility workshops and demonstrations.
• Guide API management and AI governance evaluations, including use cases, LLM traffic management, and governance requirements.
• Own technical strategy for complex enterprise deals; mentor junior solutions engineers and share customer feedback with product teams.

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, 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.

Nice to have

• Working knowledge of AI/LLM architectures and familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agentic AI patterns.
• Solid 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 AI connectivity and governance evaluations and demonstrations, including LLM traffic management, model routing, semantic caching, prompt governance and guardrails, MCP governance, agentic AI patterns, and shadow AI detection.