Principal Product Manager - Open Meter & Billing

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. Kong is building the monetization layer for the AI and API economy. Our Metering & Billing platform powers usage-based pricing for companies selling AI tokens, agents, GPU compute, and APIs. About the Role We're hiring a Sr. Staff or Principal Product Manager to run it like a founder. This is the product leadership seat for Kong Konnect Metering & Billing: you'll own the strategy, the roadmap, the narrative, and the outcome. We're writing this role specifically for ex-founders. You'll have the scope, the autonomy, and the executive air cover to operate as a founder. What you'll do Own the strategy and narrative. Decide where usage-based billing is going over the next three to five years, what Kong uniquely wins, and what we refuse to build. Defend those answers to customers, analysts, the exec team, and the board. Set the roadmap. Drive prioritization across metering, prepaid credits, entitlements, invoicing, developer portal monetization, and gateway enforcement. Own competitive positioning. Translate our structural advantages (payment-processor independence and open-source) into concrete product bets and sales motions. Lead go-to-market. Work directly with sales leadership on pricing, packaging, enablement, and the deals that matter. Be on customer calls, analyst briefings, and conference stages. Drive cross-team alignment. Partner with the Gateway team, design team, and Kong's internal product teams. Shape the open source strategy. OpenMeter is open source, and that's a strategic asset. Decide how we invest in it, grow it, and convert it. Drive the product. Lead product discussions with engineering to set the right foundations that engineering can build from. What you'll bring Founder experience. You founded a company, or were an early product leader at one. You know what it means to own an outcome. Deep technical fluency. You can read an API spec, reason about a data pipeline, have opinions and push back on engineering when the architecture is wrong. You don't need to write the code, but you need to know when it's wrong. Domain experience. Direct work with billing, payments, pricing, usage data, developer platforms, or financial infrastructure. Bonus if you built the billing system at your own company and hated how hard it was. Exceptional written communication. Your strategy is clear, and your positioning is sharp. Strong product judgment under ambiguity. You decide, you flag the rationale, and you update fast when you're wrong. Bias toward simplicity. Small surface area, strong opinions, clean abstractions. You remove complexity instead of adding it. Nice to have: Background in API infrastructure, FinOps, or AI infrastructure, experience leading open-source product strategy. Why work at Kong? Kong is the cloud connectivity company. Our platform handles trillions of API calls and is trusted by some of the largest companies in the world. Metering & Billing is one of our highest-leverage bets: as AI shifts software pricing from seats to consumption, every company building on Kong needs a way to meter and monetize what they ship. You'll be the product leader shaping that layer, with founder-level scope, executive air cover, and a clear mandate to win the category. Strategy, product, go-to-market, positioning, hiring input, exec communication: not a slice of it, all of it. You'll make real decisions with real consequences, on a product that matters to the company, in a market you can feel moving in real time. About Kong Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit #J-18808-Ljbffr Kong