Principal Product Designer - Gateway

Principal Product Designer

North America Remote (US & Canada) - Eastern

EMEA (Remote) - Eligible for work authorization sponsorship

Kong is building the future of API management for developers. We’re a fast-growing, well-funded company with happy customers and motivated employees. 

As a Principal 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. Given the technical nature of our product, a candidate must bring experience designing developer products and have a high degree of comfort with software engineering or DevOps topics.

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. Share the latest design techniques and tooling. Initiate and lead process improvements and repeatable mechanisms that lead to better product and customer outcomes across design and product.
• Be a strategic partner and visionary: Work hand-in-hand with senior leaders in long-term product strategy, visioning, and prioritization. Thoughtfully break down complex, multi-quarter design visions into small steps of customer value, using data to iteratively inform next steps.

What you’ll bring:

• 12+ years of related experience, with at least one experience designing for a developer-focused product
• A high degree of comfort with software engineering or DevOps topics
• 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

Kong has different base pay ranges for different work locations within the United States, which allows us to pay employees competitively and consistently in different geographic markets. Compensation varies depending on a wide array of factors, including but not limited to specific candidate location, role, skill set and level of experience. Certain roles are eligible for additional rewards including sales incentives depending on the terms of the applicable plan and role. Benefits may vary depending on location. US based employees are typically offered access to healthcare benefits, a 401(k) plan, short and long term disability benefits, basic life and AD&D insurance, among others. The typical base pay range for this role in the US is $212,205 - $275,840.

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.

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