Staff Product Designer (Event Gateway)
Kong • United States
Posted: January 27, 2026
Job Description
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.
Staff Product Designer (Event Gateway)
North America – United States or Canada
Kong is building the future of API and AI management. 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.
Because Kong builds highly technical products for developers, an ideal candidate has experience designing complex B2B or developer-facing products and is comfortable working with metrics, instrumentation, and experimentation in deeply technical environments.
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.
What you’ll bring
At least 6+ years of related experience, ideally in a developer tool SaaS product or similar
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
Comfort designing for developer experiences, including complex workflows, technical concepts, and system constraints
Why 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
2022 Forbes Cloud 100 Honoree
Building Great Products - Learn why the world's largest companies love our tech!
Kong Named in the Leaders Quadrant of the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for API Management for the Fourth Consecutive Year
Over 250m+ downloads of our open source API gateway! Over 40k+ stars on Github between Kong API and Kong Insomnia!
Location:
North America (United States or Canada), Pacific and Mountain timezones preferred
Some limited work travel will be required
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.
Additional Content
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.
Staff Product Designer (Event Gateway)
North America – United States or Canada
Kong is building the future of API and AI management. 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.
Because Kong builds highly technical products for developers, an ideal candidate has experience designing complex B2B or developer-facing products and is comfortable working with metrics, instrumentation, and experimentation in deeply technical environments.
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.
What you’ll bring
At least 6+ years of related experience, ideally in a developer tool SaaS product or similar
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
Comfort designing for developer experiences, including complex workflows, technical concepts, and system constraints
Why 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
2022 Forbes Cloud 100 Honoree
Building Great Products - Learn why the world's largest companies love our tech!
Kong Named in the Leaders Quadrant of the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for API Management for the Fourth Consecutive Year
Over 250m+ downloads of our open source API gateway! Over 40k+ stars on Github between Kong API and Kong Insomnia!
Location:
North America (United States or Canada), Pacific and Mountain timezones preferred
Some limited work travel will be required
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.