Product Designer

Are you ready to power the World's connections?

North America Remote (US & Canada) - Eligible for work authorization sponsorship

Are you ready to power the World's connections? Starting with the top open source API gateway, Kong products manage reliable digital connections across APIs, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. APIs are at the forefront of modern software development for companies of all sizes, and we are passionate about building products to support our users - developers, operators, and enterprise architects - to master application API deployment and integrations.

Kong is a fully distributed team with an HQ office in San Francisco. The Product Design team currently has members in San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, and Mexico. This role is remote and open to US and Canadian applicants. The role is eligible for work authorization sponsorship.

Great user experiences, including usability, of our software products is critical to the success of our Kong and the Product Design Team at Kong plays a key role in driving such. The Product Design team is part of a multi-disciplinary Product Team that includes practices for Product Design, Product Management, Documentation, and Developer Relations. Our Director of Product Design brings 20+ years of enterprise software design experience to lead our product design efforts and team with a positive, growth-minded, and supportive culture. Our executive leadership team is passionate about great design and have put significant investment into the team. This role would support other more senior designers as well as be directly tasked with key initiatives - with strong support and mentorship along the way - as this is startup. There are many product design initiatives and opportunities underway at Kong we are excited about as we scale up the Product Design Team and we are looking for great teammates to join us on this journey!

What You'll Be Doing

• UX Design. Adept at designing end-to-end user journeys, prototyping, testing, implementing, and evaluating user experiences of products.
• Visual Design. You know what good looks like and how to harness foundational elements like layout, color, type, and grids to create mock-ups that match your good eye.
• Design System. Work within an established design system while contributing to design patterns, component design, and toolkit in Figma.
• User Research. Lead & support studies with research goals that directly align with product strategy.
• Design Process. Follow a design process for product definition, facilitate cross-discipline sessions, manage inputs, and communicate progress to leadership and subject matter experts.
• Release Planning. Map holistic end-to-end user experiences, identifying interdependencies, and contributing to release and launch plans.
• Collaboration. Work with designers, engineers, and product managers to define both the short-term tactics and long-term strategy for Kong products.
• Data-Driven. Generate qualitative and quantitative data to iterate on new designs.
• Product Analytics. Ability to measure whether user journeys are performing and for whom.

What You'll Bring

• Product design portfolio required. Portfolio demonstrates an understanding of the design process, user research and design's impact on business goals.
• A true passion for creating great user interfaces & user experiences!
• Software development lifecycle. Experience working on software teams and understand how code flows to production. (Career changers new to design from product management and software engineering most welcome!)
• BA/BS or MA/MS in design, computing, psychology, or related field, or relevant experience. Also most welcome is UI, UX, and visual design education, bootcamp or on-the-job experience.

You Might Work On

• Kong Konnect - A service connectivity platform for multi-cloud environments
• Kong Gateway - The world's most popular and open source API gateway
• Kong Mesh - An enterprise-grade service mesh
• Insomnia - A popular platform for API spec testing, debugging, and publishing
• Kongponents- Our UI component library that is fundamental to our full design system

Diversity & Inclusion

• If you don't think you meet all of the criteria above 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.
• Candidates from untraditional academic backgrounds such as boot camps and internships are welcome.
• Why should you want to 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!
• APIs are driving innovation across every industry!
• 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 discuss our culture at our 2020 Company Kickoff
• Building Great Products - Learn why the world's largest companies love our tech!
• Kong Named a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant
• Over 250m+ downloads of our open source API gateway! Over 40k+ stars on Github between Kong API and Kong Insomnia!
• What is a Konger? (see our company values below...)

We are a group of makers, thinkers, and doers focused on helping today's developers build tomorrow's technology. Our teams work on the bleeding edge of API innovation to provide our users with a central nervous system for data and services.

We put design at the heart of everything we do, and we're relentlessly focused on creating beautiful experiences for our customers. That's why technology companies, major banks, e-commerce innovators, and government agencies put Kong in front of their most important web applications.

We believe in the power of Open Source and everything it stands for. That's why developers around the world enthusiastically contribute on top of our open-source platform.

We are passionate about solving challenges that will fundamentally shape the future of technology, and we're looking for the right people to join us on our mission. If you believe in taking ownership of your work, making an impact, and having fun along the way, we would love to talk to you.

Kong Core Values:

• Be Inclusive. We work together from anywhere to achieve our common goals. Our differences make us stronger.
• Be Authentic. We are genuine, principled and confident without arrogance. Show respect and kindness, especially in tough moments.
• Be Relentlessly Resourceful. We work with purpose, obsession and grit. It takes muscle to do hard things and doing hard things build muscle.
• Be Customer Obsessed. We care. Customers are everything, we put them at the center of everything you do. We are all empowered to make an impact.
• Be Curious. We value ideas over hierarchy. Never accept the status quo. We make bold bets, fail, and learn everyday. There is always a way.
• Be an Owner. We are drivers not passengers and own the quality and outcomes of our work.