Senior Manager, Cloud Operations Engineering

Senior Manager, Cloud Operations Engineering at Appian Corporation

About the role At Appian, we are committed to maintaining high standards and delivering quality in every aspect of our work. We believe that excellence is achieved through collaboration, accountability, and a strong focus on operational effectiveness. As a Senior Manager in Cloud Operations Engineering, you will be instrumental in leading a dedicated team responsible for supporting and maintaining the reliability of our cloud platform.

Your leadership will ensure that our operational processes are robust, scalable, and aligned with the company's growth objectives. This role offers an exciting opportunity to influence the operational maturity of a rapidly expanding platform, working across multiple regions and teams to uphold our commitment to excellence.

• Location:
  
  McLean, Virginia
• Engagement:
  Full-time
• Team:
  Cloud Operations Engineering

• - Lead and develop a team of approximately 11 engineers focused on Tier 2 operational support for the Appian Cloud platform engineering services.
• - Design, implement, and oversee onboarding procedures for new features entering production, ensuring comprehensive documentation, operational scripts, and support plans are in place.
• - Establish and enforce operational standards to guarantee that all features are adequately supported before deployment, minimizing post-release issues.
• - Serve as the escalation point for complex incidents, infrastructure recovery, and outages that cannot be resolved by Tier1/Solutions Engineering teams.
• - Collaborate closely with infrastructure and development teams located across Chennai, the United States, Europe, and Australia to ensure features are well‑documented, supportable, and aligned with operational best practices.
• - Drive continuous improvement initiatives to enhance operational supportability, reliability, and scalability of the platform.
• - Oversee deployment processes, including managing operational access for restricted environments such as FedRAMP and Gov Cloud, ensuring compliance and security standards are maintained.
• - Develop and maintain runbooks, operational checklists, and documentation to facilitate efficient incident response and routine operations.
• - Promote operational excellence by identifying gaps in current processes, implementing automation where possible, and fostering a culture of proactive issue resolution.
• - Mentor team members on incident management, Dev Ops best practices, and operational maturity, fostering a high‑performance support team.
• - Coordinate with cross‑functional teams to ensure that features are designed with supportability in mind from the outset, reducing operational risks.
• - Monitor platform health and performance metrics, analyzing trends to preemptively address potential issues before they impact customers.
• - Participate in strategic planning for platform scalability, security, and compliance, aligning operational capabilities with business growth.

• Demonstrated experience in building and leading a Dev Ops or Tier2/Tier3 operational support team from the ground up, with a focus on cloud platforms.
• Over 7 years of experience in Dev Ops, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or production operations, with at least 3 years in a senior management or leadership role overseeing teams.
• Extensive background in software engineering, with a minimum of 7 years of experience delivering complex projects successfully.
• Proven ability to establish operational onboarding standards, including creating runbooks, deployment checklists, and documentation for multi‑team engineering environments.
• Strong expertise in cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS, with practical experience in deploying and managing cloud services at scale.
• Hands‑on knowledge of Kubernetes, container orchestration, and related cloud‑native technologies.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automation tools, and infrastructure‑as‑code practices to streamline deployment and operational processes.
• Familiarity with incident management, root cause analysis, and disaster recovery procedures.
• Ability to work effectively with geographically dispersed teams across…