Director, Platform Engineering (Product Management)

This role is open to people who are currently in a product leadership role or someone in an engineering leadership role that is interested to make the switch into product.

This role combines experienced product management leadership with the pivotal responsibilities of a Group Product Lead, offering an opportunity to shape the product strategy and the missions of several teams. You will oversee the product management execution working closely with the product managers for several cross-functional software engineering teams around the world. This position reports to the Head of Product for the Platform Engineering Strategic Business Unit, which is responsible for Appian Cloud offering.

An excellent candidate will come with a wide range of experience in a product leadership role in the cloud infrastructure domain at a software-as-a-service firm. The product portfolio owned by this position will cover a wide range of cloud native infrastructure and services – from the highly available, resilient, scalable, and efficient infrastructure components on which all Appian Cloud services operate to the the scalable, enterprise-grade managed services that power the backend data persistence and event streams for customer sites in Appian Cloud. You will provide product management leadership for initiatives that deliver efficient and scalable infrastructure, core compute capacity, and managed data planes as multi-tenant services to accelerate the innovations of Engineering teams throughout the department. Your portfolio will include aspects that intersect with AWS account and VPC topology, Kubernetes clusters, network mesh, and edge web layer, as well as efforts to transform existing systems and software components into cloud-native, Kubernetes-based and multi-tenant managed services while achieving incremental value for our customers from intermediate milestones.  

You'll form strong relationships with counterparts within the Engineering department as well as stakeholders in other departments. You will oversee the creation of an impactful vision and ensure alignment between the product managers in your group and the roadmaps of the feature teams that rely on the services and frameworks provided by your organization. You will be accountable for the business impact of the features your group delivers. This includes owning the product strategy and feature backlog and ensuring effectiveness and adherence to standard product management processes. 

This position is based at our office in Chennai, India. Appian was built on a culture of in-person collaboration, which we believe is a key driver of our mission to be the best. This role will be 5 days office based from 11th Floor, Tower B, Brigade World Trade Center, Chennai.

What you'll do:

• Oversee the initiation, planning, execution, and rollout for strategic initiatives.
• Lead the creation and ongoing maintenance of a multi-team, short-term and long-term feature backlogs strongly 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, 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.

About you:

• 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. An especially strong candidate will have previous exposure to the infrastructure behind Software-as-a-Service 
  cloud product offerings.
• Understanding of networking and cross-VPC connectivity and the security and compliance requirements that apply to such systems with respect to enterprise 
  customers. Previous experience with zero trust connectivity implementations would be a strong asset.
• 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.
• 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).
• 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.