Director, Platform Engineering (Product Management)

Overview

Lead product management for the cloud infrastructure portfolio of Appian Cloud's Platform Engineering Strategic Business Unit, overseeing product managers for several cross-functional engineering teams.

What you'll do

• Oversee the initiation, planning, execution, and rollout for strategic initiatives.
• Lead the creation and ongoing maintenance of multi-team, short-term and long-term feature backlogs aligned to product and corporate vision.
• Initiate and facilitate conversations across business units and departments to reach alignment on strategy, roadmap, key investments and messaging.
• Build relationships with key business stakeholders, keeping them apprised of important features, critical scope changes, and planned investments.
• Help identify and cultivate the next generation of product management leaders.
• Provide constructive feedback on feature specifications to ensure new feature delivery provides optimal impact.
• Coach product managers on balancing functional and non-functional enhancements and system improvements.
• Continuously enhance and improve the product management processes and techniques at Appian.

What you'll need

• Strong technical background, likely as a former software architect or developer.
• Proven people management skills in guiding product managers to success.
• Passion for the backend and infrastructure technologies that power cloud-based enterprise software systems, including proprietary, open-source, and industry-standard components, especially those in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation landscape.
• Experience with cloud native technologies and Kubernetes.
• Understanding of networking and cross-VPC connectivity and the security and compliance requirements that apply to such systems with respect to enterprise customers.
• Understanding of data persistence, object storage services, event streaming platforms, multi-tenant shared services, and the security and compliance requirements that apply to such systems with respect to enterprise customers.
• Strong interest in the scalability, performance, security, observability, and reliability of distributed systems.
• Excellent communication skills, comfortable talking high-level strategy with CxOs in the morning and feature details with developers in the afternoon.

Nice to have

• An especially strong candidate will have previous exposure to the infrastructure behind Software-as-a-Service cloud product offerings.
• Previous experience with zero trust connectivity implementations would be a strong asset.
• Experience delivering cloud infrastructure features built using AWS services such as EKS, ECR, transit gateways, WAFs, and Global Accelerator (or similar offering from other cloud providers).

Details

• Based at Appian's office in Chennai, India; 5 days office based from 11th Floor, Tower B, Brigade World Trade Center, Chennai.
• Reports to the Head of Product for the Platform Engineering Strategic Business Unit.
• This role is open to people currently in a product leadership role or an engineering leadership role interested in switching into product.