Director of Professional Services - EMEA
Kong
Sales & Business Development
Europe · Middle East · Africa
Posted on Friday, September 6, 2024
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.
About the role:
You will be working at a dynamic, fast paced, and sometimes hectic startup as the Regional Director of Kong's Customer Experience Professional Services team which has the core responsibility of engaging with our customers across the post-sales lifecycle, ensuring they receive the utmost value from their investment in Kong technology.
As the leader of this team, you will ensure the successful day to day operations of our Field Engineers and Solution Architects in the EMEA region.
The world-class support & technical consulting services this team provides is quintessential in driving customer satisfaction, retention, & future expansion. Our Field Engineers are available to guide customers through the implementation and delivery of Kong technology while our Solution Architects are available to serve as long-term trusted and strategic advisors throughout the technical journey, helping to outline an overall API strategy and drive the continued education, adoption, and use of Kong solutions.
In this role, you will provide strategic direction and mentorship while owning direct reporting and P&L responsibility. Additionally, you will serve as a trusted partner and sponsor for our largest and most critical customers, interfacing with everyone from Developers to Executives as you representing Kong culture and values every day.
This is one of the most challenging roles in the industry and we are trying to do things differently. Your existing playbook and experience will be useful but expect the need to innovate and be creative in how we address everything from titles to billable project structure.
Above all you’ll be acting as a stellar leader and mentor for the rest of Kong.
What you'll be doing::
- Accountability for the services utilization and revenue targets while holding self and Kong to a high standard of customer experience
- Lead an organization responsible for deliberate and material influencing of customer adoption and consumption of services
- Establish and maintain a culture of mutual accountability between Professional Services and customers
- Partner with other field EMEA teams (Partner, Sales, Customer Success, Support, Pre-Sales) for continuous improvement of our customer engagement methodologies
- Support Kong teams in management of risk throughout the engagement lifecycle
- Responsible for developing the capabilities and maturity of the leaders and employees on your team
- Responsible for developing/ enhancing capabilities and GTM Offerings to drive adoption and consumption
- Ensure healthy relationships with the Kong delivery ecosystem (sub- partners, contractors, GSIs) to maintain complementary delivery capacity
- Owner of all delivery assets, tools, capabilities, systems, processes, and playbooks
- Aggressively maintain a robust recruiting pipeline, attracting the highest quality talent in the industry to support excellence and rapid growth
- Building business case for head counts and collaborating with other functions like HR, Finance, Ops for approvals
- Collaborating with other functions across the company as a key partner to EMEA Professional Services strategy development and execution
What you'll bring:
- Achieve and exceed EMEA revenue targets (billable utilization as proxy)
- Identify and manage leading indicators around deliberate behaviors that help to accelerate customer consumption
- Successful evolution of the capability of Kong Professional Services - roles and responsibilities, career paths, scalability of team, capacity, and delivery excellence
- Kong Professional Services regional teams increasingly capable of delivering complex projects
- Kong Professional Services regional teams increasingly effective at influencing customer decisions
- Healthy Partner leverage to drive revenue realization
Who you are:
- Above all - a leader who loves growing their team
- Expressively passionate and determined about technology
- Collaborative and enjoy working with others
- You operate with the utmost transparency and authenticity both internally and externally
- Self-awareness and strong communication skills are a must
- You have 10+ years of relevant professional services experience including 5+ years of senior leadership experience
- You are familiar with modern software constructs and architectural patterns and how to discuss them with humans while also knowing your limits and can hand off to the team when necessary
- Proven ability in managing professional services functions
- Proven ability to write and present on complex topics
- Proven track record of exceeding key business goals including bookings, revenue, margin, NDR and similar
- Prior experience in Open-Source/ SaaS companies is highly preferred
- Prior experience managing customer facing teams with financial goals is highly preferred
- Ability to travel to customer and Kong locations as-needed (post COVID)
About Kong:
Kong is THE cloud native API platform with the fastest, most adopted API gateway in the world (over 300m downloads!). Loved by developers and trusted with enterprises’ most critical traffic volumes, Kong helps startups and Fortune 500 companies build with confidence – allowing them to bring solutions to market faster with API and service connectivity that scales easily and securely.
83% of web traffic today is API calls! APIs are the connective tissue of the cloud and the underlying technology that allows software to talk and interact with one another. Therefore, we believe that APIs act as the nervous system of the cloud. Our audacious mission is to build the nervous system that will safely and reliably connect all of humankind!
For more information about Kong, please visit konghq.com or follow @thekonginc on Twitter.
We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.