K

Kong

High-performance API management and connectivity

Enterprise Account Executive

Full-Time
$320k - $400k/yr+ Uncapped commissions + Equity opportunities
Senior
Springfield, IL, USA+1 moreMore locations: Illinois, USA
Remote
Sales & Account ManagementAccount Executive

About the job

Requirements
  • At least 7 years of enterprise sales experience, ideally selling into organizations with 5,000 or more employees.
  • Proven success closing complex, high-value deals in SaaS, cloud, infrastructure, or enterprise software.
  • Experience building pipeline, acquiring new logos, and expanding strategic accounts.
  • Experience selling to C-level executives and navigating multiple stakeholders.
  • Skills in consultative selling, negotiation, forecasting, and account planning.
  • Experience with Salesforce or a similar CRM platform.
  • Ability to take ownership of a sales territory in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial environment.
Responsibilities
  • Own the full enterprise sales cycle, from prospecting and pipeline generation through executive engagement, negotiation, close, and expansion.
  • Build and maintain a strong pipeline while delivering against revenue targets.
  • Develop relationships with C-level executives and key decision-makers, serving as a trusted advisor.
  • Lead strategic account planning and identify new opportunities within enterprise accounts.
  • Partner with Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and technical teams to deliver appropriate customer solutions.
  • Maintain accurate forecasting and pipeline management while tracking market and competitive trends.
Desired Qualifications
  • Knowledge of APIs, open source, cloud, or infrastructure technology.

About the company

K

Kong

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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

1,001-5,000

Company Stage

Series E

Total Funding

$345.6M

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2017

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • September 2026 Volcano launch targets agent builders moving production workloads now.
  • Kong AI Gateway 2.2 adds MCP deployment and cost controls for enterprise AI spend.
  • Bruce Felt joined as CFO in February 2026, signaling heavier enterprise and IPO discipline.

What critics are saying

  • Bifrost, Portkey, and Cloudflare AI Gateway compress Kong's AI gateway differentiation in 2026.
  • Volcano expands scope into crowded developer platforms, inviting direct fights with AWS and Azure.
  • Kong's plugin-heavy architecture increases migration friction if buyers standardize on native platform tools.

What makes Kong unique

  • Kong unifies API, AI gateway, and agent infrastructure in one stack.
  • Volcano, launched September 30, 2026, adds durable compute, databases, auth, and storage.
  • Konnect couples gateway traffic with governance for hybrid and multi-cloud enterprises.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

  • Weekly Donut Chats
  • Home Office Stipend
  • Flexible Time Off & Dedicated Unplug Days
  • Virtual Events

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

0%

1 year growth

0%

2 year growth

3%
SD Times
Oct 14th, 2026
Kong announces Context Management for efficient AI agent use.

Kong announces Context Management for efficient AI agent use. BySD Times October 14, 2026 Kong today has announced Kong Context Management, designed to ensure agents can access more of the enterprise context it needs without swamping the model with everything it could use. The new capability is generally available today as part of Kong AI Management. Large enterprise APIs can have hundreds of operations, which when exposed through MCP, turns into hundreds of tools, Kong noted in its announcement. So, even if the model only needs one of those tools, it may need to process all of them, and this "becomes a problem of context consumption, token cost, latency and tool selection," Kong wrote in its blog announcement. That, Kong wrote, creates four compounding problems: Context window tax. Every tool definition consumes context that could otherwise be used for the user's request, conversation history, retrieved information, and the model's reasoning. Reasoning degradation. The agent has to choose among an increasingly large collection of tools, often containing similar or overlapping operations. More choices can make selecting the right tool harder. Higher token costs. Tool definitions consume tokens whenever they're sent to the model. Unnecessary definitions can become a recurring cost across every agent interaction. Higher latency. More context to process and repeated model-to-tool interactions can translate into slower agent experiences. To ensure the agent can access the capabilities behind the API, Kong's Code Mode presents a smaller interface for agents to find and execute the operations they need at runtime, Kong said. An agent can search the available API surface for the operation it needs, retrieve the relevant schema on demand, and execute it without requiring every available operation to be represented as a tool in the model's context. With Code Mode, agents can use code to compose multiple operations, including logic such as loops, conditionals, and error handling. That can reduce the number of model round-trips required to complete complex work while keeping unnecessary tool definitions out of the model's context. The result is an architecture designed to improve three things that matter when agents move into production: * Cost: Reduce unnecessary token consumption and model interactions. * Performance: Reduce context overhead and unnecessary round trips. * Quality: Give the model a more focused set of capabilities to reason over at any given time.

Forrester
Oct 14th, 2026
Why MuleSoft, not Agentforce, is Salesforce's most strategic AI asset.

Why MuleSoft, not Agentforce, is Salesforce's most strategic AI asset. Oct 14 2026 MuleSoft Agent Fabric is MuleSoft's recent enhancement to deliver an agentic AI control plane. During the Dreamforce keynote, I noticed something subtle but significant. I didn't see "MuleSoft Agent Fabric." Instead, I saw "Agent Fabric," with the MuleSoft branding dropped and the Salesforce logo replacing the Mule logo in the UI. Forrester sees agentic AI consisting of three planes: the build plane, the orchestration plane for runtime, and the control plane for governance. Long term, I believe the first two will converge: Where you build an AI agent often dictates where you can run it. But it will be impossible to shoehorn all your agents into one build-and-orchestrate platform, resulting in multiplatform sprawl for that part of the agentic AI stack. In contrast, the need for one central place to govern AI agents will push agentic AI control planes to be multiplatform - just like how API management governs APIs across any number of API runtime platforms. That makes the control plane more strategic than the other two. For Salesforce, its emerging agentic AI control plane is Agent Fabric. AI governance is the future of API Management. Leading API management vendors recognize that the agentic AI control plane is the future of the market. I'm even inclined to rename the market "API and AI management" for my next Forrester Wave(TM) evaluation of API management. MuleSoft and competitors Kong and WSO2 have built strong AI gateways to govern LLM and MCP connections. But like APIs, governance is more than just a gateway. Gravitee, Kong, MuleSoft, and WSO2 deliver deep analytics for MCP and LLM token FinOps. MuleSoft has expanded its API portal to include LLMs, MCP servers, and agent cards. Gravitee's beta portal is slated to deliver similar capabilities soon. Both vendors are the first to deliver endpoint versioning for LLM, MCP, and A2A endpoints. Forrester clients can explore this more through Forrester's vendor comparison tool for API management vendors, based on my evaluative research, The Forrester Wave(TM): API Management Software, Q3 2026. Salesforce's advantage over API Management vendors: the full platform. But there are two things that MuleSoft, or rather Salesforce, has to augment its agentic AI governance that those other API management vendors lack: a broad agentic AI orchestration platform and context data to feed agents at runtime. To be clear, it is not assured that Salesforce will deliver a viable AI orchestration + context platform. Today, it is an amalgamation of Agentforce, Data 360, Headless Toolkit, AIforce, Informatica, MuleSoft's iPaaS for deterministic workflows, Slack, and more. Bolted-together Frankensteins create friction through unduly complex user experiences and complicated SKU purchases. But at least it's something. This could go in one of two paths. The ideal path is that Salesforce unifies its Frankenstein into a holistic AI platform with minimal buying and UX friction under one brand. One can imagine a future where Salesforce's agentic AI offering consolidates into three products - and I mean three real products engineered as such, not marketecture. The more likely path is that Salesforce stumbles to deliver. The obvious problem is that bringing together disparate M&A products into something that works is difficult. Notice in the above figure, though, that the control plane is the only layer that isn't currently a stitched-together Frankenstein. Unlike the rest of the platform, Salesforce's AI agent control plane is already one holistic product: Agent Fabric. Between its strategic positioning for buyers, its holistic product design, and its ability to extend Salesforce's reach to agents in every platform, MuleSoft's Agent Fabric, not Agentforce, is Salesforce's most strategic AI asset. AI agent control and governance is the most strategic element of the above for buyers. But AI orchestration is closest to where work gets done, so more economic activity flows through it, resulting in a larger total addressable market for tech vendors to chase after, especially in the near term. That may tempt Salesforce to chase after orchestration at the expense of Agent Fabric when it should be doubling down on Agent Fabric. This is especially likely so long as the Agentforce and MuleSoft business units remain siloed from each other. Agent Fabric has a strong lead compared to the competition. Will Salesforce expand that lead or blow it? MuleSoft's customers and competitors anxiously wait to find out. If you'd like to discuss Salesforce's strategy more deeply with me, schedule a guidance session or inquiry. See david mooter at: Technology & Innovation Forum East November 4-5, 2026, New York City Cut through CX tech noise and buy smarter. I walked into my first Dreamforce as a skeptic. Salesforce has made several attempts at IT service management, and none of them have provided the technical depth needed by IT teams. After a single briefing on the latest product and then months of silence, I had filed the effort under another short-lived experiment. The pre-announcements [...] As AI systems become more autonomous, security alone isn't enough to build trust. Learn how responsible AI helps organizations govern AI agents, manage emerging risks, and keep systems aligned with business goals and values.

Techstrong
Oct 2nd, 2026
Kong extends reach and scope of AI Gateway to improve governance.

Kong extends reach and scope of AI Gateway to improve governance. TL;DR - Key Takeaways - Kong introduced Volcano, a platform for building and deploying AI agents, alongside an updated AI Gateway with expanded governance and cost-control capabilities. - Kong AI Gateway 2.2 adds declarative deployment of MCP servers and support for Microsoft Foundry, Amazon SageMaker, Kimi and Jev. - Future Kong Konnect updates are expected to add an AI registry and catalog, context mesh, token vault, AI observability and spending-tracking tools. Kong Inc. this week added a platform for building artificial intelligence (AI) agents while at the same time updating its AI gateway to provide organizations with the governance capabilities needed to minimize costs. Announced at the company's API + AI Summit, Kong also revealed that future updates to the Kong Konnect application connectivity platform will add support for an AI registry and catalog, a context mesh for discovering backend services, AI observability capabilities, a token vault, tools for tracking AI spending and a Webhook Engine to drive event-based applications. The Volcano platform for building AI agents is designed to be used either standalone or in conjunction with the AI gateway provided by Kong to access a built-in content delivery network (CDN) and authentication services. The overall goal is to provide builders of AI agents with access to a gateway through which it becomes simpler to provide an AI agent with access to any number of backend services, says Kong CTO Marco Palladino. Builders of AI agents, for example, can now provision PostgreSQL databases in seconds, with built-in backups and vector support for AI workloads, including branches. "Building and deploying AI agents today is fragmented," says Palladino. "We're making it as easy as possible." With the release of version 2.2 of the Kong AI Gateway, Kong, in addition to embedding cost-control capabilities, also now makes it possible to declaratively deploy Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Kong also is adding support for the Microsoft Foundry and Amazon SageMaker platforms along with Kimi and Jev AI models. It's not clear at what rate organizations are deploying AI gateways, but they provide a layer of abstraction through which organizations can give AI agents access to backend services in a way that can be centrally governed and managed. There is already no shortage of AI gateways. The challenge now becomes determining which AI gateway provides the most governance capabilities for accessing headless backend services that AI agents are dynamically invoking in ways that are difficult to predict. Unfortunately, in many organizations the proverbial AI agent horse is already before the cart. Deployment of both sanctioned and unsanctioned AI agents is well ahead of most organizations' ability to effectively govern what will soon become thousands of AI agents strewn across the enterprise. As such, the need to deploy some type of AI gateway through which security and compliance policies can be enforced is becoming more pressing with each passing day. Regardless of how governance of AI agents is achieved and maintained, the probability that there will be multiple security and compliance incidents involving AI agents is high. As such, IT teams need to rapidly deploy some type of gateway to first minimize the number of those incidents while simultaneously putting in place the processes needed to respond to incidents involving AI agents. The fundamental challenge, of course, is that AI agents operate at machine speed, which means the potential blast radius of an incident is going to increase exponentially with each passing second.

PR Newswire
Sep 30th, 2026
Kong announces winners of the 2026 Partner Awards.

Kong announces winners of the 2026 Partner Awards. Sep 30, 2026, 17:00 ET Kong Partner Awards honors the partners leading the charge for customers building AI in production SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, announced the winners of its 2026 Partner Awards, awarded during Kong's API + AI Summit in Los Angeles. The awards recognize the partners across Kong's global ecosystem who are turning API and AI connectivity into real customer outcomes. "The AI race is on, and our partners are playing a critical role in helping customers move from experimentation to production," said Ken Kim, SVP of Business Development at Kong. "They're helping enterprises navigate an increasingly complex technology landscape. This year's winners demonstrate what's possible when we combine Kong's technology with the expertise, reach, and innovation of our partner ecosystem. We're proud of what we've accomplished together thus far and even more excited to build upon this success!" This year's honorees were recognized for achievements spanning joint customer wins, geographic impact, AI-focused pipeline and pursuits, solution innovation and integration, and investment in Kong. The 2026 Partner Award recipients include: * Partner of the Year: AWS is delivering exceptional business impact by combining the power, scale, and global reach of AWS with Kong Konnect and Kong AI Gateway. Together, we're helping customers of all types and industry segments around the world compete in the AI era, moving at unprecedented speed without sacrificing the control, security, or flexibility required to operate at enterprise scale. * Solution Partner of the Year, Americas: AHEAD is helping customers turn AI ambition into action through security solutions designed to help enterprises deploy AI safely and at scale. A strong co-selling motion with Kong has translated that expertise into meaningful pipeline and customer wins across the Americas. * Solution Partner of the Year, EMEA: ApiShare has distinguished itself as a trusted advisor for API and AI connectivity, combining deep governance expertise with Kong's platform. This year, the partnership generated new opportunities across EMEA that are translating directly into new logos and expansion. By bringing governance into AI strategy early, APIShare and Kong are creating a unified foundation spanning APIs, AI, agents, and emerging technologies. * Solution Partner of the Year, APJ: International Integrated Systems, Inc. (IISI) empowers organizations to modernize legacy API architecture as a launchpad for enterprise AI initiatives, steering customers from legacy API management toward AI-ready gateway and governance solutions. Combining deep technical proficiency with robust joint co-selling efforts alongside Kong, IISI emerged as the top regional driver of new customer logos this year. This collaboration delivered significant adoption across Taiwan's premier BFSI institutions, securing major wins. * Emerging Market Partner of the Year: Perceptiva is our Emerging Market Partner of the Year, recognizing their presence across Latin America this year. The team has engaged on deals across the region and across industry verticals, taking on important sales functions that help bring Kong solutions into new markets - not just opening doors, but seeing the business through. This consistent, cross-market presence is what earned them this recognition and paves the way for how Kong serves a region we see as critical to our future. * Tech Partner of the Year: Noma Security is strengthening the security posture of joint customers as enterprise AI adoption accelerates. Strong co-selling, executive alignment, and a growing pipeline across life sciences, enterprise software, financial services, insurance, and hospitality demonstrate a partnership that truly delivers. Together, Kong and Noma are putting security and governance at the center of enterprise AI adoption. * Rising Star: WWT, with Kong AI Gateway now live in its Advanced Technology Center (ATC), they're giving customers a hands-on environment to explore AI connectivity, governance, and security before deploying into production. The collaboration brings these capabilities into WWT's broader enterprise AI strategy and gives customers a practical path from experimentation to deployment. The ATC is the starting line, and we're excited about what's ahead. * Rising Star: Presidio has quickly built strong momentum with Kong, driving a growing pipeline of AI-focused opportunities across new customers, expansions, and renewals. Behind that momentum is an expanding bench of Presidio architects, consultants, and account teams bringing Kong into customer conversations through resell, co-sell, and influenced opportunities. With a strong foundation already in place, Kong and Presidio are turning AI opportunities into real business outcomes. * Rising Star: NTT DATA has grown its partnership with Kong from an initial collaboration in Japan with iQuattro into a truly strategic partnership, driven by multiple joint wins across large enterprises within Automobile, Media and FS sectors. Building on that success, the partnership has now expanded globally across the Americas, UK&I, Iberia, and Latin America. Beyond a growing portfolio of joint GTM initiatives and customer pursuits, we are taking the partnership even deeper through joint solution development within NTT DATA's AI Studio, creating the foundation for the next phase of our collaboration around AI and Agentic AI. * Americas GSI Partner of the Year: Infosys has translated its relationship with Kong into meaningful opportunities across enterprise software, manufacturing, energy, financial services, and retail. Strategic integrations with Infosys Topaz Fabric and the InfyMe platform further extend Kong's API and AI connectivity capabilities into enterprise solutions, creating new ways for customers to modernize and advance their AI strategies. * AI Innovation GSI Partner of the Year: Persistent Systems is pushing joint AI innovation forward across automotive, enterprise software, financial services, and payments. Its GenAI Hub integration puts Kong to work as the strategic AI gateway layer, giving enterprises the connectivity, governance, and control needed to move AI initiatives from experimentation into production. * Enterprise Integration & Kong Capability Partner of the Year: Cognizant has delivered significant impact across insurance, automotive, life sciences, financial services, and banking while building one of the strongest Kong migration practices in the ecosystem. With more than 300 Kong-badged or certified associates, Cognizant has invested deeply in the expertise required to help enterprises navigate complex API modernization and migration initiatives. * Solution Innovation GSI Partner of the Year: Wipro has embedded Kong API Gateway and Kong AI Gateway directly into WEGA, its agentic AI platform, establishing an orchestration and governance layer for enterprise AI. The integration is already fueling joint go-to-market opportunities across banking, retail, technology, travel and hospitality, entertainment, and professional services, turning solution innovation into tangible opportunities in the field. * EMEA GSI Partner of the Year: TCS has delivered joint wins and built a growing pipeline across energy, telecommunications, financial services, technology, aviation, and media. The partnership spans both API management and agentic AI governance, combining TCS's industry and delivery expertise with Kong's platform to address the evolving connectivity requirements of enterprises across EMEA. * Industry Excellence GSI Partner of the Year: Coforge stands out for translating deep expertise in financial services, insurance, and aviation into customer success with Kong. Its understanding of these complex industries lets our teams ground modernization solutions in each customer's business and technology environment, turning vertical expertise into joint wins and new opportunities for growth. About Kong Inc. Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500(R) 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. For more information, visit www.konghq.com. SOURCE Kong Inc.

Yahoo Finance
Sep 30th, 2026
Kong launches Volcano: AI-native platform for building and deploying AI agents

Kong has announced Volcano, an AI-native platform designed to provide developers with unified infrastructure for building, deploying and operating AI agents and modern web applications. The platform integrates durable compute, branchable databases, file storage, user authentication and real-time services in a single developer-friendly environment. "Developers shouldn't have to stitch together infrastructure to turn an AI agent into a production application," said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong. Volcano includes first-class integrations with agentic coding tools like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Cursor. Key features include durable workflows, branchable PostgreSQL databases with vector support, edge functions, frontend hosting, authentication services, real-time messaging, global file storage, and coordination tools for single and multi-crew agents.