Full-Time

Senior Director of Global Sales Strategy & Operations

Sales Strategy & Operations

Kong

Kong

1,001-5,000 employees

High-performance API management and connectivity

Compensation Overview

$233k - $275k/yr

Washington, USA + 6 more

More locations: California, USA | Texas, USA | Albany, NY, USA | New York, NY, USA | Maryland, USA | Illinois, USA

Hybrid

Hybrid work is indicated for all listed locations.

Category
Sales & Account Management (1)
Required Skills
Forecasting
Salesforce
REST APIs
Data Analysis

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Requirements
  • At least 8 years of experience in Sales Strategy, Sales Operations, or Revenue Operations, including at least 3 years in a Sales Operations or Sales Strategy leadership role at a B2B SaaS company, with direct ownership of territory design, capacity planning, quota setting, and annual sales planning.
  • Demonstrated experience owning a global or multi-theater sales operating cadence, including forecasting, pipeline inspection, quarterly business reviews, and executive reporting, for an organization of meaningful scale such as $100 million or more in revenue or 100 or more quota-carrying representatives.
  • Experience supporting a company through a major go-to-market model transition, such as new market or theater expansion, a new product motion launch, or a pricing model shift from subscription to usage-based or consumption pricing.
  • A proven track record of partnering directly with senior Sales leadership at the Vice President, Senior Vice President, or Chief Revenue Officer level as a trusted strategic advisor, with the executive presence to influence global and regional sales leaders.
  • Hands-on experience applying data and analytics, and ideally artificial-intelligence-enabled tools, to sales performance management, including pipeline and conversion analysis, representative productivity insights, and forecasting models, with fluency in Salesforce and modern go-to-market systems.
Responsibilities
  • Serve as the strategic and operational partner to global and regional Sales leaders across theaters and segments, driving performance management, execution rigor, and revenue growth.
  • Lead the evolution of the global sales model as the company scales to more than $1 billion in revenue, including global expansion, establishing new motions for new products, and driving a go-to-market transformation aligned with usage-based pricing models.
  • Own global sales planning, including segmentation, coverage models, capacity planning, territory design, quota planning, resource allocation, and annual planning alignment with company revenue goals.
  • Establish and run the global sales operating rhythm, including forecast reviews, pipeline inspections, quarterly business reviews, business reviews, performance scorecards, executive reporting, and front-line manager inspection frameworks.
  • Operate the analytics and insights engine to identify risks, productivity gaps, conversion opportunities, representative performance trends, and growth levers across regions and segments.
  • Partner with Marketing, Sales Development Representatives, Customer Success, Product, Finance, Enablement, Systems, and Deal Desk to drive cross-functional go-to-market execution, multi-product sales motions, and priority revenue initiatives.
  • Lead the adoption of artificial intelligence as a force multiplier across Sales Strategy and Operations and the global sales organization by embedding it into planning, seller workflows, manager inspection, forecasting, account prioritization, pipeline generation, and productivity initiatives.

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

  • April 30, 2026 PolyAI and June 3, 2026 ADEO validate enterprise demand.
  • May 19, 2026 Singapore launch and EMEA customer growth show international momentum.
  • July 23, 2026 Harness partnership expands Kong into AI security and governance.

What critics are saying

  • MuleSoft, Apigee, and cloud vendors compress pricing and steal migration budgets.
  • AI gateway features commoditize fast; partners like Harness and Noma can bypass Kong.
  • If Konnect migrations stall, Kong's open-source gravity weakens enterprise monetization by 2027.

What makes Kong unique

  • Kong unifies APIs, AI Gateway, Konnect, and Insomnia across production workflows.
  • February 2, 2026 MCP Registry and AI connectivity make Kong agent-native.
  • April 14, 2026 AI Gateway added agent-to-agent traffic, extending runtime control.

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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

-1%

2 year growth

0%
PR Newswire
Aug 4th, 2026
Kong announces conference agenda for API + AI Summit 2026.

Kong announces conference agenda for API + AI Summit 2026. Aug 04, 2026, 09:00 ET Taking place in Los Angeles on September 30-October 1, the conference will feature speakers from LinkedIn, The Vanguard Group, Southwest Airlines, and Spotify SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, has announced the agenda for its ninth annual API + AI Summit on Sept. 30-Oct. 1 at the InterContinental in Los Angeles. The conference brings together the top engineers, architects, and technology leaders building today's AI innovations. The agenda features speakers from global brands including LinkedIn, The Vanguard Group, Southwest Airlines, and Spotify. The theme of this year's conference, "Where APIs and AI Meet in Production", will be explored through discussions, technical sessions and hands-on labs focused on providing attendees with practical guidance for securely deploying AI in production, managing AI and API traffic across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and building resilient, governed AI applications at scale. The full list of sessions can be found here. "Where APIs and AI Meet in Production isn't just this year's theme, it's the reality organizations are facing today," said Augusto Marietti, CEO and Co-Founder, Kong." The conversation has shifted from what's possible with AI to how to deploy it securely, govern it effectively, and connect it to the systems that run the business. At this year's API + AI Summit, we're bringing together the leaders shaping the next generation of AI to share what's working, what's changing, and what's coming next." Tracks for this year's conference include: * AI Governance: for leaders governing LLM access, security, and compliance. * APIs for the AI Era: for teams rebuilding their API foundation for AI workloads. * Agentic Architecture Best Practices: for streaming and data teams building reactive agents. * Token Cost Management: for teams managing AI costs and monetization. * Context Engineering: for engineers connecting agents to production systems. * Agent Stack Labs: five hands-on labs for engineers who want to build. Sponsors of the event include Amazon Web Services, EPAM, Noma Security, Akamai, Google Cloud, Harness and Zelar. About Kong Inc. Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, 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.

PR Newswire
Jul 23rd, 2026
Harness and Kong expand partnership to deliver API and AI security for agentic era

Harness and Kong Inc. have expanded their partnership to provide comprehensive API and AI security solutions. The collaboration extends beyond their existing API Gateway integration to include Kong AI Gateway, addressing security challenges in AI-driven architectures and autonomous agents. According to a 2025 report, 62% of enterprises lack visibility into their LLM usage, whilst 74% believe AI sprawl will surpass API sprawl in terms of risk. The expanded solution offers AI discovery, automatically inventorying AI assets routed through Kong AI Gateway, and AI protection through real-time behavioural analysis to detect threats like prompt injection and data exfiltration. The integration builds on the companies' existing API security partnership, applying similar security depth to AI infrastructure. Both the API Gateway and AI Gateway integrations are now generally available to joint customers.

Goldin Digital Publishing Inc.
Jul 23rd, 2026
Harness and Kong Expand Strategic Partnership

Harness and Kong expand strategic partnership. July 23, 2026 Harness and Kong announced an expansion of their strategic partnership to address the growing security challenges posed by AI-driven architectures, autonomous agents, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) deployments. The two companies are extending their joint solution from Kong API Gateway to also include Kong AI Gateway, bringing Harness's AI security intelligence directly into the AI infrastructure layer and enabling enterprises to discover, monitor, and protect every agent, AI asset, LLM-powered service, and MCP-connected workflow that traverses it. Harness and Kong have been jointly trusted by enterprises to deliver best-in-class API security for years. The existing Harness and Kong API Gateway integration provides: - Comprehensive API traffic visibility and behavioral analysis across all Kong-managed services - Real-time detection and blocking of API threats, including OWASP API Security Top 10 risks, credential stuffing attacks, and business logic abuse - Continuous sensitive data tracking to identify PII exposure and regulatory risk - Zero-friction deployment alongside existing Kong configurations This new offering of the AI Gateway solution applies the same level of security depth to AI infrastructure, ensuring that security teams are not left behind as their organizations adopt AI and agentic operations. "Our partnership with Harness has given joint customers production-grade API security that works with the way they build, not against it," said Ken Kim, Senior Vice President, Business Development at Kong Inc. "Extending to include Kong AI Gateway is a natural next step. The same enterprises are now moving AI into production through our gateway and need the same depth of visibility and control they've come to rely on for their APIs for all AI traffic types including LLM, MCP, and A2A. That's exactly what this delivers and is crucial for organizations scaling in the agentic era." The new Harness and Kong AI Gateway integration directly tackles these challenges across two critical domains: AI discovery and AI protection. - AI Discovery: Harness automatically inventories every AI asset, API, MCP server, tool, prompt, and resource routed through Kong AI Gateway - providing security teams with a continuously updated catalog of their AI attack surface. No manual documentation. No blind spots. - AI Protection: Harness applies behavioral analysis and anomaly detection to AI traffic in real time, identifying prompt injection attacks, data exfiltration through AI responses, jailbreaking, malicious code in prompts, and other AI-specific threats. Enterprises gain the same depth of observability and protection for their agents and AI workloads that they already rely on for traditional APIs, with full prompt and response details available for incident investigation and inline policy enforcement through Kong AI Gateway. "Shadow AI has become the defining security blind spot for enterprises today. Traditional tools were built for static code and predictable systems, not for adaptive AI models, agent-to-agent communication, and MCP-connected workflows that evolve continuously," said Rahul Sood, GM of Application Security at Harness. "This integration of Harness AI Security with Kong puts security intelligence directly into the connectivity layer where AI traffic flows. Joint customers now have the visibility and control they need to move fast without losing sight of what's happening across their AI infrastructure." The Harness and Kong API Gateway integration is generally available now for all joint customers. The Kong AI Gateway integration, including AI Discovery and AI Protection, is also generally available now. Industry news. July 23, 2026 Azul announced that it will deliver monthly Critical Security Patch Updates (CSPUs) for Java Long-Term Support (LTS) versions for both Azul Core and Azul Prime, starting in August 2026. July 23, 2026 Prismatic announced native large data sync, a set of new capabilities that enables teams to move high volumes of customer data through the same integration platform they already use to build, deploy, monitor, and manage customer-facing integrations. July 23, 2026 Harness and Kong announced an expansion of their strategic partnership to address the growing security challenges posed by AI-driven architectures, autonomous agents, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) deployments. July 22, 2026 Sauce Labs introduced AURA, its AI-Unified Release Assurance platform, to close that gap. July 22, 2026 Harness announced the Harness AppSec Alliance, a strategic partner ecosystem that brings together application security, API and Agent security capabilities on a single platform. July 22, 2026 Mirantis announced that both k0s, its lightweight single-binary Kubernetes distribution, and k0rdent, its open-source distributed container management platform, have achieved CNCF Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance at Kubernetes v1.35. July 21, 2026 Google introduced Gemini 3.6 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, and Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber to help developers and customers build AI agents in production with higher token efficiency, lower latency, and reliable performance. July 21, 2026 Harness is extending its platform to cover the full AI Agent Development Lifecycle (DLC), giving enterprises a single set of pipelines and controls to build, test, deploy, and run agents the same way they already ship everything else. July 21, 2026 BellSoft announced the general availability of a new hardened builder image for Paketo Buildpacks(TM). July 20, 2026 Testlio unveiled the next evolution of its AI-driven testing platform, LeoCore(TM). July 20, 2026 Agent Island released v1.7.1. July 17, 2026 GitLab(link is external) released GitLab 19.2. As AI generates more code, dependencies, and change than developers can keep up with, GitLab 19.2 brings agentic automation to clear that load. July 16, 2026 Progress Software(link is external) announced that its Progress Chef(link is external) platform now delivers enterprise lifecycle management and configuration capabilities for NVIDIA DGX Spark, enabling IT teams to securely provision, monitor and manage the desktop AI supercomputer at scale. July 16, 2026 Atlassian Corporation announced new capabilities in Jira to advance AI-native software development for every engineering organization. July 16, 2026 Intruder announced the launch of AI Pentesting for web applications, providing on-demand penetration testing.

PR Newswire
Jul 22nd, 2026
Kong opens Paris and Milan offices as EMEA customer base grows 72% year-over-year

Kong Inc., a developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, has opened new offices in Paris and Milan, driven by strong growth across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). The company reported a 72% year-over-year increase in its regional customer base and expanded its headcount by 71% over the past two years. The Milan office will function as an engineering hub supporting R&D, product innovation, and customer success. The location marks a return to the city where co-founders Augusto Marietti and Marco Palladino started the company. Notable new customers include ING Bank, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Mistral, and PolyAI. Kong now has employees in 14 countries across EMEA, with expanded offices in London and Budapest alongside the new Paris and Milan locations.

Kong
Jul 21st, 2026
Build reuse into your API program with Konnect Dev Portal.

Build reuse into your API program with Konnect Dev Portal. The new Kong Konnect Dev Portal is now generally available for all users! In March, Kong announced the public beta version of its reimagined Dev Portal. Kong set out to fully address the needs of the modern API consumer as well as the needs of the moder New enhancements to Konnect to fuel api-driven innovation. APIs are the lifeblood of disruption... when leveraged correctly. The best, most disruptive businesses are able to harness API growth as a strategic opportunity. But how? With an API platform that drives innovation, faster delivery, and top-tier kongctl 1.0: A declarative, ai-native CLI for Kong Konnect. kongctl was built with the modern development stack in mind. Developers working in a terminal want the ability to query systems quickly to verify state, behaviors, and capabilities. Coding harnesses need well defined tools and accurate schemas for Rick Spurgeon How to test Gateway APIs directly from Kong Konnect with Insomnia. What You'll Build To explore the new integration, I'll build a realistic API platform workflow using Konnect, Kong Gateway, and Insomnia. By the end of this tutorial, I'll have: A Konnect Control Plane (KongAir Dev) A local Kong Gateway Data Pl Juhi Singh How Kong used agentic AI to fix Kong Gateway's flakiest tests. Quality is at the core of every product Kong build. To move fast without compromising on quality, Kong rely on an extensive set of test suites that tell Kong quickly whether a change has caused a regression. Those suites are large enough that a single ful Datong Sun A unified Gateway for APIs + agentic applications on vmware VKS with Kong Konnect. Built on top of Kong API Gateway, the Kong AI Gateway is designed to address key challenges in enterprise AI adoption. Modern AI applications rarely rely on a single model; instead, they orchestrate multiple GenAI providers, agent frameworks, Age Anika Suri New MCP support across the entire Konnect platform. Bridging the API (and API access) gap between AI coding tools, agents, and the APIs that they "eat" Data might be the fuel for AI. But APIs are the proper way to package that "fuel" as AI-ready "food" is through the API. AI coding tools can do a lot The new Kong Konnect Dev Portal is now generally available for all users! In March, Kong announced the public beta version of its reimagined Dev Portal. Kong set out to fully address the needs of the modern API consumer as well as the needs of the moder APIs are the lifeblood of disruption... when leveraged correctly. The best, most disruptive businesses are able to harness API growth as a strategic opportunity. But how? With an API platform that drives innovation, faster delivery, and top-tier kongctl was built with the modern development stack in mind. Developers working in a terminal want the ability to query systems quickly to verify state, behaviors, and capabilities. Coding harnesses need well defined tools and accurate schemas for Rick Spurgeon What You'll Build To explore the new integration, I'll build a realistic API platform workflow using Konnect, Kong Gateway, and Insomnia. By the end of this tutorial, I'll have: A Konnect Control Plane (KongAir Dev) A local Kong Gateway Data Pl Juhi Singh Quality is at the core of every product Kong build. To move fast without compromising on quality, Kong rely on an extensive set of test suites that tell Kong quickly whether a change has caused a regression. Those suites are large enough that a single ful Datong Sun Built on top of Kong API Gateway, the Kong AI Gateway is designed to address key challenges in enterprise AI adoption. Modern AI applications rarely rely on a single model; instead, they orchestrate multiple GenAI providers, agent frameworks, Age Anika Suri Bridging the API (and API access) gap between AI coding tools, agents, and the APIs that they "eat" Data might be the fuel for AI. But APIs are the proper way to package that "fuel" as AI-ready "food" is through the API. AI coding tools can do a lot The new Kong Konnect Dev Portal is now generally available for all users! In March, Kong announced the public beta version of its reimagined Dev Portal. Kong set out to fully address the needs of the modern API consumer as well as the needs of the moder APIs are the lifeblood of disruption... when leveraged correctly. The best, most disruptive businesses are able to harness API growth as a strategic opportunity. But how? With an API platform that drives innovation, faster delivery, and top-tier