Staff Product Designer - AI Gateway

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.

Kong is building the future of API management for developers. We’re a fast-growing, well-funded company with happy customers and motivated employees.

As a Staff Product Designer at Kong, you’ll collaborate closely with product managers, engineers, and other stakeholders to understand customer needs and craft exceptional solutions for our customers. Because we’re a small team, you have the opportunity to make a significant impact on our end-to-end product experience. Given the technical nature of our product, an ideal candidate will have familiarity with using or designing developer experiences.

What you’ll do:

• Design exceptional experiences: Design experiences that our customers need and love. Lead complex projects from early concepting to final UI design, while upholding our design standards and design system. Apply systems thinking by looking beyond your product area for opportunities to improve overall cohesion and usability.

• Champion customers: Take time to understand our customers, their jobs-to-be-done, and infuse this understanding into your work and that of others. Identify and make a compelling case for improving existing areas of our product to better meet the needs of our customers.

• Drive alignment: Solicit diverse perspectives, early and often, to strengthen your work. Communicate context, including customer data, business impact, trade-offs, and rationale, to generate alignment and make forward progress.

• Demonstrate ownership: Proactively educate people outside of the design team on the best way to work together. Be clear about your priorities and level of urgency. Keep people informed about your progress, risks, and changes to timelines. Take initiative to improve our team and its practices.

• Level others up: Role model best practices and mentor junior members of the design team. Share the latest design techniques and tooling. Initiate and lead process improvements and repeatable mechanisms that lead to better product and customer outcomes across design and product.

• Be a strategic partner and visionary: Work hand-in-hand with senior leaders in long-term product strategy, visioning, and prioritization. Thoughtfully break down complex, multi-quarter design visions into small steps of customer value, using data to iteratively inform next steps.

What you’ll bring:

• 6+ years of related experience, with at least one experience designing for a developer-focused product

• A portfolio that demonstrates expertise in all phases of design, including:

  • Leading a collaborative design process from definition to delivery

  • Conducting your own user research

  • Making data-informed design decisions

  • Positively impacting customers and improving business metrics

  • Demonstrating strong communication and storytelling skills (written and verbal)

  • Using and contributing to a shared design system and team processes

  • Crafting aesthetically-pleasing and pixel-perfect final UI

• A portfolio that demonstrates shared platform experience, including:

  • Working effectively across teams to gather input, generate options, and drive alignment toward a successful conclusion.

About Kong:

Kong Inc., a leading developer of cloud API technologies, is on a mission to enable companies around the world to become “API-first” and securely accelerate AI adoption. Kong helps organizations globally — from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises — unleash developer productivity, build securely, and accelerate time to market. For more information about Kong, please visit www.konghq.com or follow us on X @thekonginc.

Compensation Range: $137.9K - $210.7K