Product Manager II - Cloud Infrastructure

When you join Appian, you’ll be part of a passionate team dedicated to accomplishing hard things, together.

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.

You will be the product manager working closely with the team whose mission is to strengthen and optimize site infrastructure by delivering essential upgrades, resource efficiency, and scalable solutions. You will be responsible for the direction and roadmap of a component of the Appian Cloud data plane that ensures reliable, high-performance operations for all Appian Cloud customer sites.

This role is specifically focused on the cloud-native persistence and messaging layer. You will oversee the backend sub-systems—including technologies like S3 and Redis—that power the platform's internal data plane and core services. This component of the software is not directly user-facing but has strong implications on the scalability and reliability requirements our customers expect.

What you will be doing:

• Prioritize and Define: Work on an agile team to prioritize, define, and ensure the success of infrastructure and managed services features for a high-level strategic roadmap.
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Prioritize what we should build and when by collaborating with stakeholders on product vision and strategy, while taking customer feedback into account.
• Technical Discussions: Define how infrastructure features will work through close collaboration with engineers in design sessions and architecture diagrams.
• Backlog Management: Manage the release and sprint backlog through planning, backlog grooming, execution, and review.
• Specification Writing: Write detailed specifications for the team and fellow product managers to review and provide feedback on.
• Impact Analysis: Track adoption and usage of new features, applying appropriate metrics and analytics to evaluate whether they are having the desired impact.
• Ownership: Own features all the way through final documentation, go-to-market, prioritization of bugs, and usage analysis.

About you:

• Experienced: You have 3+ years of relevant experience in product management or engineering, ideally within a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company.
• Technical at Heart: You have a strong technical background and an understanding of key concepts related to availability, scalability, resiliency, and security.
• Cloud-Native Enthusiast: You understand the value of cutting-edge infrastructure technologies like Kubernetes and are passionate about cloud-native architecture.
• Strategic Thinker: You are a problem solver with a proven ability to prioritize, negotiate, and execute in a fast-paced environment.
• Clear Communicator: You can draw clarity out of complex environments and communicate technical benefits to various audiences.

Nice to have:

• Cloud Infrastructure Expertise: Experience with AWS services (e.g., EC2, ElastiCache/Redis, S3, EBS, EFS, DynamoDB) to support mission-critical systems.
• Persistence Domain Knowledge: Experience or interest in the scalability and reliability of distributed persistence and messaging systems.
• DevOps Mindset: A believer in the principles of DevOps and Infrastructure as Code.
• Education: BA/BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.

This role is based at our Chennai office in Brigade World Trade Center Chennai. Appian was built on a culture of in-person collaboration, which we believe is a key driver of our mission to be the best. Employees hired for this position are expected to be in the office 5 days a week to foster that culture and ensure we continue to thrive through shared ideas and teamwork. We believe being in the office prov