Director of Customer Experience, Apj

**Are you ready to power the World's connections?**

**About the role**:
You will be working at a fast-paced startup as the leader of the Customer Experience, APJ team, reporting to the Chief Customer Officer. This organisation has roles that are responsible for interfacing with our customers across the pre and post-sales lifecycle, and you will be responsible for driving customer value realization and overall customer experience. Our Customer experience teams are looking to lead the way in the industry and shape how companies in our space engage with customers for the next 20 years.

As the leader of the team, you will act as a trusted partner and sponsor for our largest and most critical customers. Ensuring all successful day-to-day operations for the Customer Success Management (CSM), Consulting Engineers, Consulting Architects and Engagement Managers teams in APJ. You will also be responsible for ensuring the execution of the global CX Vision.

In this role, you will have the opportunity to interface with everyone in the customer environment from Developers to Executives, and represent Kong culture and values everyday. You will also be collaborating to ensure the cross-functional Customer Experience teams execute on this vision.

This is one of the most interesting roles in the industry combining technical and customer success skills, 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**:
- Own APJ Customer Experience teams including hiring, staffing, growth and day-to-day operations.
- A proven track record with fast-growing organisations, using data to drive initiatives and decision-making processes.
- Define, build, and execute playbooks aligned to effective solutions for the customer journey.
- Collaborate and partner with multiple teams regularly (Sales, Product, Marketing Support, etc) helping to build customer value realization “brand” across our entire organization.
- You will be measured on driving adoption, NDR, customer renewals, and expansion.
- Manage escalations without supervision.
- Act as a technical mentor for the team, while this is a managerial role you should have some relevant insight and experience to provide the team with authentic mentorshipUnderstand how to effectively present executives (internal and external) with data and business cases/justification

**What We Are Looking For**:
- Above all - a leader who loves growing their team.
- You know how to deal with ambiguity and the ability to navigate through it with perseverance, driving positive energy and point of view.
- Technical mindset with the aptitude to learn about development environments and API management domain.
- Familiarity with modern software constructs and architectural patterns and how to discuss them with humans - but know your limits and hand off to the team when necessary.
- Self-awareness and strong communication skills are a must.
- Operate with the utmost transparency and authenticity both internally and externally.
- 10+ years of experience in customer-facing roles required.
- Proven track record of exceeding key business goals including bookings, revenue, margin, NDR and similar metrics.
- Prior experience in Open Source companies 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). As the innovation leader of cloud API technologies, Kong is on a mission to enable companies around the world to become "API-first" and securely accelerate AI adoption. Kong helps organizations globally - from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises - unleash developer productivity, build securely and accelerate to market.

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

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