Full-Time

Enterprise Account Executive

Updated on 5/8/2026

Kong

Kong

501-1,000 employees

High-performance API management and connectivity

Compensation Overview

$260k - $360k/yr

New York, NY, USA + 1 more

More locations: Massachusetts, USA

Remote

Category
Sales & Account Management (1)
Required Skills
Sales
Forecasting
Salesforce
Data Analysis
Requirements
  • 7+ years of experience in enterprise sales (>1k employees), with a proven track record of closing complex deals in a SaaS, cloud, or enterprise software environment
  • Demonstrated success in selling to large enterprises, particularly to senior-level executives and across multiple departments
  • Strong consultative selling skills, with the ability to understand customer needs and present compelling solutions that drive business outcomes
  • Excellent communication and negotiation skills, capable of managing high-stakes conversations and building lasting relationships with stakeholders
  • A results-driven mindset, with a passion for meeting and exceeding sales goals and revenue targets
  • Experience working with CRM platforms (e.g., Salesforce) and leveraging data to forecast accurately and track sales metrics
  • Analytical and strategic thinking, with a knack for identifying business growth opportunities and devising plans to capitalize on them
  • Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial environment, taking ownership of your sales territory and adapting to changing market dynamics
Responsibilities
  • Develop and execute sales strategies to target enterprise customers, focusing on building and maintaining a robust pipeline that drives long-term growth
  • Own the entire sales cycle, from prospecting and initial outreach to contract negotiations and closing deals, while consistently meeting or exceeding revenue targets
  • Collaborate with internal teams, including product, marketing, and customer success, to ensure a seamless sales experience and alignment on customer needs
  • Identify customer pain points and align our solutions to address these, delivering customized product demos and presentations tailored to their specific business needs
  • Build and nurture relationships with C-level executives and key decision-makers within target accounts, establishing yourself as a trusted advisor and ensuring customer satisfaction and retention
  • Lead account planning efforts by researching potential customers, understanding industry trends, and developing strategies to win new business and grow existing accounts
  • Monitor and manage sales activities and results, accurately forecasting opportunities and keeping detailed records of interactions and progress in CRM systems
  • Stay updated on industry trends, competitor offerings, and market changes to position our product effectively and maintain a competitive edge
  • Contribute to business growth initiatives, providing feedback to product and marketing teams to influence product development and go-to-market strategies
  • Represent Kong with professionalism, acting as a brand ambassador at industry events, conferences, and customer meetings
Desired Qualifications
  • Knowledge of open-source software, APIs, or infrastructure software is highly advantageous

Kong helps organizations manage and secure APIs in cloud-native environments. Its main products are Kong Gateway, a fast API gateway that routes, secures, and scales API traffic; Kong Konnect, a unified SaaS platform for API management; and Kong Mesh, an enterprise service mesh that coordinates microservices. Kong Gateway runs efficiently at high traffic levels and can operate on platforms like Kubernetes. The company differentiates itself by combining open-source software with paid features, support, and managed services, focusing on cloud-native architecture to improve developer productivity and application performance.

Company Size

501-1,000

Company Stage

Series E

Total Funding

$344.1M

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2017

Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Solace partnership unifies APIs, events, AI governance control plane.
  • Bruce Felt CFO appointment prepares Kong IPO scaling growth.
  • Insomnia 12 accelerates MCP development AI-powered testing.

What critics are saying

  • Cloudflare Agent Cloud erodes Kong AI Gateway market share.
  • BlueRock Trust Context Engine undercuts Context Mesh capabilities.
  • OutSystems Agentic Systems bypasses Kong connectivity layer dependency.

What makes Kong unique

  • Kong Agent Gateway governs A2A communication with unified observability.
  • Context Mesh auto-discovers APIs for AI agent tooling integration.
  • MCP Registry enables enterprise discovery of AI agent tools.

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Your Connections

People at Kong who can refer or advise you

Benefits

Weekly Donut Chats

Home Office Stipend

Flexible Time Off & Dedicated Unplug Days

Virtual Events

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

-1%

1 year growth

0%

2 year growth

0%
AiThority
Mar 25th, 2026
Kong names Bruce Felt as Chief Financial Officer.

Kong names Bruce Felt as Chief Financial Officer. Veteran finance leader joins Kong to help scale the business through its next stage of accelerated growth. Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, has announced that Bruce Felt has joined the company as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Felt is a seasoned finance leader who brings deep experience guiding enterprise software companies through their most critical growth phases, including several initial public offerings, strategic acquisitions, and expansion into global markets. Additionally, Mr. Felt has led finance organisations from formative early-stage environments to enterprises operating at a significant global scale. Over the course of his career, he has taken three companies public as CFO, including FullTime Software, SuccessFactors, and Domo, and has overseen major acquisitions and strategic transactions. Most recently, Mr. Felt served as Chief Financial Officer at Domo, a cloud-based software company focused on analytics and business intelligence, where he helped scale the business and led the company through its public market journey. Mar 25, 2026 Prev Next 1 of 42,761 "Bruce has repeatedly helped high-growth software companies scale through transformative periods, pairing operational discipline with strategic insight and several crossings into public markets. As Kong continues to expand its leadership in API and AI connectivity, his experience building durable, globally scaled organisations will be a unique asset in our next journey," said Augusto Marietti, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Kong Inc. "He brings the right mix of operational rigor and public company experience, while keeping a growth-oriented profile. We're extremely excited to welcome Bruce onto the Kong team, and I look forward to partnering with and learning from him." Felt currently serves on the boards of directors of several organisations, including Veradigm, Human Interest, Betterworks, and Cambium Networks, among others, and has held board and audit committee leadership roles at both public and private companies. Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and AI-native startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic - on any model, any cloud.

PR Newswire
Feb 19th, 2026
Kong appoints Bruce Felt as CFO to drive growth and potential IPO

Kong, a developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, has appointed Bruce Felt as chief financial officer. Felt brings extensive experience guiding enterprise software companies through growth phases, having taken three companies public as CFO: FullTime Software, SuccessFactors and Domo. Most recently, Felt served as CFO at Domo, a cloud-based analytics and business intelligence company, where he scaled the business through its public market journey. He currently serves on several boards including Veradigm, Human Interest, Betterworks and Cambium Networks. Kong CEO Augusto Marietti said Felt's experience building globally scaled organisations will support the company's expansion in API and AI connectivity. Felt will help scale Kong through its next growth phase, leveraging his operational discipline and public company expertise.

Technology AI Insights
Feb 19th, 2026
Kong and Solace Partner to Deliver Unified Data Governance for the Agentic AI Era

Kong and Solace Partner to deliver unified data governance for the agentic AI era. Kong Inc., a recognized leader in API and AI connectivity solutions, has announced that Solace, the real-time data and agentic AI company, has officially joined Kong's Premium Technology Partner Program. Through this strategic collaboration, both companies aim to provide enterprises with a unified, governed, and fully observable data fabric built specifically for the fast-growing agentic AI era. As a result, teams will be able to manage APIs, events, and AI services seamlessly through a single control plane. Today's organizations are under increasing pressure to innovate quickly while still maintaining strict security, governance, and compliance standards. At the same time, agentic AI systems require real-time, contextual data to flow smoothly across business operations. However, many enterprises still manage APIs and event streams in separate silos. Consequently, these disconnected systems create governance blind spots, slow down deployment cycles, and raise operational risks. To address these challenges, Kong and Solace are combining their strengths to simplify and strengthen enterprise connectivity. By integrating Solace's real-time data movement technology with Kong's API and AI connectivity platform, organizations can now govern APIs, event streams, Large Language Models (LLMs), and MCP servers from one centralized control plane. In addition, businesses can apply consistent authentication, lifecycle management, access controls, and policies across the entire data path. Solace brings high-performance real-time data movement, event governance, and event-driven orchestration that supports agentic AI workflows. Meanwhile, Kong delivers centralized API management, robust security enforcement, advanced observability, and AI gateway capabilities. This is achieved through Kong Event Gateway's native protocol support alongside the REST-like interface provided by Kong API Gateway. Ultimately, enterprises gain one consolidated platform where all data interactions from streaming events to API calls to AI service requests remain fully visible and easy to manage. "Event-driven and API-driven architectures are no longer separate concerns," said Ken Kim, Senior Vice President, Business Development at Kong Inc. "By bringing Kong and Solace together under a unified control plane, customers gain centralized governance, consistent security policies, and end-to-end observability across every data interaction from REST APIs to streaming events to AI agent calls. This is essential for organizations scaling in the agentic era." This partnership highlights how organizations are increasingly looking for unified approaches to data governance as AI adoption accelerates. "Real-time data is the lifeblood of modern, agentic AI," said Shawn McAllister, CPO and CTO at Solace. "Together with Kong, Solace is removing the silos between events, APIs, and AI services that slow down modern organizations, helping to accelerate innovation and empower teams to confidently scale their real-time, AI-ready platforms." In addition to the partnership announcement, Kong also emphasized the importance of its Premium Technology Partner Program. The program is designed to provide enterprises with trusted, validated integrations and plugins that enhance Kong's commercial offerings, including Kong Konnect and Kong Gateway Enterprise. Premium partners receive engineering support, validation against the latest Kong releases, and opportunities for deeper collaboration. For customers, this program expands access to a curated ecosystem of cutting-edge integrations backed by Kong's quality standards. For partners like Solace, it creates new revenue opportunities, early product insights, and closer engagement with Kong's engineering roadmap. With this alliance, Kong and Solace are positioning enterprises to confidently scale real-time, AI-ready platforms while ensuring governance, security, and observability remain at the core of the agentic future.

PR Newswire
Feb 10th, 2026
Kong launches Context Mesh to connect enterprise APIs to AI agents

Kong has launched Context Mesh, a product that automatically discovers enterprise APIs, transforms them into agent-consumable tooling, and deploys them with runtime governance. The offering addresses the integration gap threatening agentic AI initiatives by enabling AI agents to access enterprise data through existing API infrastructure. Context Mesh uses knowledge from Kong's Konnect platform to automate agent integration, including automatic API discovery, curated toolkits, instant Model Context Protocol generation, and gateway deployment with inherited access controls. Generated tooling is registered in Kong's MCP Registry for enterprise-wide discovery. The launch follows Gartner research warning that 40% of agentic AI initiatives risk cancellation by 2027 without proper integration solutions. Context Mesh is available in tech preview for Konnect deployments.

PR Newswire
Feb 2nd, 2026
Kong launches MCP Registry to govern and discover AI agent tools at enterprise scale

Kong has introduced MCP Registry within Kong Konnect Catalog, creating an enterprise directory for registering, discovering and governing Model Context Protocol servers and AI-native tools for agentic applications. The registry integrates with the MCP ecosystem whilst remaining compliant with the AI Alliance Interoperability Framework standard. Operating as an extension of Kong's existing API Catalog, MCP Registry enables organisations to govern MCP servers alongside their underlying API dependencies, ownership and policies. This provides enterprises with visibility and control over AI agent tools with the same rigour applied to mission-critical infrastructure. The announcement addresses challenges enterprises face in scaling AI initiatives, with S&P Global reporting 42% of companies abandon AI projects before production. MCP Registry will be available in technical preview this month, with additional capabilities expected to follow.