Principal Product Manager - Open Meter & Billing

Kong • Sacramento, CA

23h

About The Position

Kong is building the monetization layer for the AI and API economy, with its Metering & Billing platform powering usage-based pricing for companies selling AI tokens, agents, GPU compute, and APIs. The company is hiring a Sr. Staff or Principal Product Manager to lead this platform, owning the strategy, roadmap, narrative, and outcomes. This role is designed for ex-founders, offering significant scope, autonomy, and executive support to operate as a founder. Kong is a cloud connectivity company whose platform handles trillions of API calls and is trusted by large companies. Metering & Billing is a high-leverage initiative, addressing the shift from seat-based to consumption-based pricing in the AI era. The successful candidate will be the product leader shaping this layer, making real decisions with real consequences in a rapidly evolving market.

Requirements

• 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 Haves

• Background in API infrastructure, FinOps, or AI infrastructure
• Experience leading open-source product strategy

Responsibilities

• 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 This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 251-500 employees