Engagement Manager

Are you ready to unlock intelligence?

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.

We are looking for an Engagement Manager to join the growing Professional Services team  an Engagement Manager, you will have the opportunity to work across the entire customer lifecycle to drive prescriptive outcomes and successful delivery of engagements and programs for key customers.

The engagement manager will ensure our customers are getting the most value out of Kong products and will help prepare, manage, and deliver strategic engagements across the defined install base. As a primary professional services contact and ambassador for our customers, the engagement manager is a strategic, long‑term, relationship‑based customer‑facing role. Apart from driving successful delivery of services engagements, the Engagement Manager will focus on driving day to day professional services operations.

This is an important role and requires someone with very strong thought organization, and communication skills along with the ability to multitask, context switch, and manage customer escalations. Working at Kong presents a unique opportunity to help customers modernize their approach to IT to embrace Cloud Native development principles.

• Customer Delivery
  • Own and lead selected, simultaneous billable customer engagements and manage customer expectations and drive prescriptive outcomes during the entire customer lifecycle (Post Sales, Delivery, and Value Realization).
  • 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.
  • Own and drive project management activities and oversee completion of engagement kickoffs, project charters, and deliverables, managing schedules, meeting milestones, and ensuring success throughout the engagement lifecycle end to end to deliver business outcomes.
  • Prepare customer‑facing and internal collateral such as solution presentations, blueprints, reusable artifacts, project plans, burndowns, and status reports.
  • Identify, prioritize, and own resolution of internal and customer escalations & project risks, driving an effective resolution across technical, business, and executive stakeholders.
  • Makes use of productivity tools like Financial Force, Salesforce, Metabase, Trello, etc. to maintain and manage programs of multiple onboarding and implementation projects along with reporting on key business metrics (Billings, Utilizations, Resource Capacity, and Forecasting).
• Professional Services Operations
  • Assist Services leadership team with resource assignment and management in Financial Force.
  • Ensure timely completion of Month and Quarter end close process and complete new PS employee onboarding with content tailored to the new hires’ positions.
  • Coordinate with cross functional teams to obtain relevant data about the project opportunity and staffing requirements.
  • Become a subject matter expert for services personnel on all processes related to services revenue: time entry, project management processes related to operations, customer billing, and staff utilization.
  • Continually provide suggestions and implement improvements to business and reporting processes that keep up with the changes in the organization.
  • Support Professional Services staff to better understand revenue, hours, and target attainment goals.

• Strong project/program management and services delivery experience with a track record of delivery for strategic customers on time and within budget.
• Deep experience working with project financial fundamentals and PSA tools such as Financial Force to own and drive operational activities (Reporting, Forecasting, and Tracking).
• 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…