Sr. Practice Manager - Professional Services
United States
Professional Services – PS Leadership /
Full-time /
Remote
Are you ready to power the World's connections?
If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others.
About the role:
We are looking for a Senior Practice Manager to join the growing Professional Services team at Kong. As a Sr. Practice Manager, you will have the opportunity to work across the entire customer lifecycle and lead the regional professional services team(Architects and Engineers) to drive prescriptive outcomes for Kong customers. You will be responsible for success across the defined install base to drive adoption, consumption, customer satisfaction, expansion and ensure team growth and development.
Practice Manager will ensure our customers are getting the most value out of Kong products. As a primary professional services contact and ambassador for our customers, the practice manager is a strategic long-term, relationship-based customer-facing role. Apart from driving key business metrics, the Practice Manager will also focus on practice building, growing, and evolving the team as well as driving day-to-day professional services business needs.
This is an important role and requires someone with exceptional leadership, organizational, communication skills and the ability to multitask, context switch, and manage the entire customer deployment lifecycle. This role also involves supporting various stakeholders(Sales, Pre Sales, Customer Success, Product, Engineering, Finance, RevOps, and others). Working at Kong presents a unique opportunity to help customers modernize their approach to IT to embrace Cloud Native development principles.
Why should you want to work at Kong?
Market Opportunity - We are on a quest to build a $10b+ software company over the next few years and need YOUR help!
Why APIs Matter? APIs have been enabling innovation for decades!
Strong VC team, Series D, strong year over year revenue growth!
Technical Leadership - We are recognized as the leader in innovation in the connectivity space.
Marco, our CTO/co-founder - “We are the Cisco of L4 and L7” - CUBE Conversation, March 2021
We are the leading innovator in the connectivity space!
Amazing Team & Culture - Come be a "Konger" and find out what we mean.
Great Place to Work Certified in 2020 & 2021
Kong employees exemplify our culture at our 2022 Sales Kickoff
Building Great Products - Learn why the world's largest companies love our tech!
Over 250m+ downloads of our open source API gateway! Over 40k+ stars on Github between Kong API and Kong Insomnia!
What we are looking for:
- Across the defined regional customer base, engage with customer organizations (from Developers, Architects to C-level executives) to build the initial professional services direction, and oversee the customer success throughout the Kong deployment phase including the onboarding/adoption phase of the customer journey.
- Engage with Kong customers across the sales and pre-sales cycle to define overall implementation and deployment strategy to ensure success.
- Perform activities to gather scope and build prescriptive outcome-based proposals for immediate and long-term adoption. This will include negotiating MSAs, SOWs as well as partner agreements.
- Work with customers and stakeholders to understand and analyze engagement scope, requirements, time, cost, benefits, etc. Drive the engagement lifecycle end to end to deliver business outcomes.
- Responsible for achieving key business metrics such as PS Bookings, Team Utilization, Revenue Growth, Overall success, and satisfaction across the defined customer cohort.
- Identify, prioritize, and own resolution of internal and customer escalations & project risks, driving an effective resolution across technical, business, and executive stakeholders.
- Build a high-performing diverse team, hire the best talent, and lead from the front setting the team up for success. Build strong relationships across cross-functional teams at Kong.
- Engage routinely with the Kong Product, Engineering, and Sales team to build an overall strategy to drive adoption, innovation, and maturity in our engagement & delivery model.
- Strengthen Kong adoption and success across the defined regional customer install base by developing strong delivery partner executive relationships and awareness of partner delivery capabilities.
- And any additional tasks required by manager
What you will bring to Kong:
- Strong professional services leadership background and experience in the API/Open Source space would be an added advantage
- Experience overseeing service delivery in the enterprise IT delivery across a multi-million-dollar portfolio
- Deep experience in building and developing remote professional services teams including career growth planning, performance, and resource management
- Excellent customer-facing skills and ability to communicate with executives as well as other stakeholders at customer sites and cross-functionally within Kong. Ability to demonstrate relationship building internally and externally
- Exceptional organizational and change management skills with an ability to manage competing client, organizational, and changing business needs
- Excellent presentation skills along with a strong understanding of professional services business metrics in a SaaS software environment. Ability to manage critical and political situations with business stakeholders with strong interpersonal skills
- Proven team player, and team builder who loves to work in a fast-growing and roll up their sleeves in a dynamic environment and can keep pace with constant change.
Kong has different base pay ranges for different work locations within the United States, which allows us to pay employees competitively and consistently in different geographic markets. Compensation varies depending on a wide array of factors, including but not limited to specific candidate location, role, skill set and level of experience. Certain roles are eligible for additional rewards including sales incentives depending on the terms of the applicable plan and role. Benefits may vary depending on location. US based employees are typically offered access to healthcare benefits, a 401(k) plan, short and long term disability benefits, basic life and AD&D insurance, among others. The typical base pay range for this role in the US is $150,000 - 180,000. This role does have a variable in addition to the base pay.
What is a Konger?
We are a group of makers, thinkers, and doers focused on helping today’s developers build tomorrow’s technology. Our teams work on the bleeding edge of API innovation to provide our users with a central nervous system for data and services.
We put design at the heart of everything we do, and we’re relentlessly focused on creating beautiful experiences for our customers. That’s why technology companies, major banks, e-commerce innovators, and government agencies put Kong in front of their most important web applications.
We believe in the power of Open Source and everything it stands for. That’s why developers around the world enthusiastically contribute on top of our open-source platform.
We are passionate about solving challenges that will fundamentally shape the future of technology, and we’re looking for the right people to join us on our mission. If you believe in taking ownership of your work, making an impact, and having fun along the way, we would love to talk to you.
Kong Core Values:
We are CUSTOMER CHAMPIONS. Customers are everything, we put them at the center of everything we do. We are all empowered to make an impact.
We are OWNERS. We are drivers, not passengers and own the quality and outcomes of our work.
We are UNSTOPPABLE. We work with purpose, obsession, and grit. It takes muscle to do hard things and doing hard things builds muscle.
We are REAL. We are genuine, principled, and confident without arrogance. Show respect and kindness, especially in tough moments.
We Are ACCELERATORS. We prioritize speed, iteration, and results.
We are GLOBAL. We work together from anywhere to achieve our common goals. Our differences make us stronger.
We are EXPLORERS. We value ideas over hierarchy. Never accept the status quo. We make bold bets, fail, and learn everyday. There is always a way.
About Kong:
Kong is THE cloud native API platform with the fastest, most adopted API gateway in the world (over 300m downloads!). Loved by developers and trusted with enterprises’ most critical traffic volumes, Kong helps startups and Fortune 500 companies build with confidence – allowing them to bring solutions to market faster with API and service connectivity that scales easily and securely.
83% of web traffic today is API calls! APIs are the connective tissue of the cloud and the underlying technology that allows software to talk and interact with one another. Therefore, we believe that APIs act as the nervous system of the cloud. Our audacious mission is to build the nervous system that will safely and reliably connect all of humankind!
We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.
