Senior Product Manager, Platform Engineering

You will be the product manager working on the mission to strengthen our self-managed distribution of Appian by analyzing trends in customer use cases, prioritizing the delivery of essential features and enhancements, and driving adoption of Appian on Kubernetes. You will be responsible for the direction and roadmap of the Appian on Kubernetes offering, ensuring reliable, high-performance operations for customers running Appian in their own managed environments.

This role emphasizes a connection to the customer. You will form relationships with key points of contact within our customers' organizations and must be equally comfortable conversing with deeply technical IT staff and executives alike. You will use your prior experience with deploying and managing containerized software in Kubernetes environments to explain to customers how Appian on Kubernetes adheres to cloud-native principles and meets enterprise-grade requirements. Likewise, you will use your deep domain knowledge to understand and analyze customer-provided use cases and enhancement requests to judge suitability for the future product backlog.

This role is based at our ​​headquartered in ​McLean, Virginia. 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 provides more opportunities to come together and celebrate working with the exceptional people across Appian.

What You'll Do

• Define and execute the product roadmap for Appian on Kubernetes.
• Prioritize product investments based on customer feedback, business impact, and technical strategy.
• Partner closely with Engineering to define requirements, refine backlog priorities, and guide implementation.
• Collaborate with architects and engineers to design scalable, cloud-native platform capabilities.
• Establish clear product boundaries between customer-managed infrastructure and Appian-managed functionality.
• Write detailed product requirements and specifications for engineering teams.
• Track feature adoption and success through customer feedback, product metrics, and usage analytics.
• Own the product lifecycle from ideation through documentation, launch, and ongoing enhancements.
• Partner with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success to support go-to-market initiatives and product positioning.
• Build strong relationships with enterprise customers to understand complex deployment challenges and influence future product direction.

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in Product Management or Software Engineering within an enterprise software organization.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Experience managing products supporting both SaaS and customer-managed deployments.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native technologies and Kubernetes.
• Experience working with containerized applications throughout the deployment and operational lifecycle.
• Knowledge of enterprise infrastructure concepts including scalability, availability, resiliency, and security.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate complex technical concepts for both technical and executive audiences.
• Experience partnering directly with enterprise customers to influence product strategy.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Kubernetes platforms such as Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE, Red Hat OpenShift, Rancher, or VMware Kubernetes Service.
• Experience building or supporting Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs).
• Familiarity with software deployments in denied, degraded, intermittent, and limited (DDIL) environments.
• Understanding of enterprise data sovereignty and regulatory requirements, including frameworks such as DORA.
• Experience supporting customers in highly regulated industries, including government, financial services, healthcare, or life sciences.

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