Senior Manager, Cloud Operations Engineering

Here at Appian, our values of Intensity and Excellence define who we are. We set high standards and live up to them, ensuring that everything we do is done with care and quality. We approach every challenge with ambition and commitment, holding ourselves and each other accountable to achieve the best results. When you join Appian, you’ll be part of a passionate team dedicated to accomplishing hard things, together.

• Build and lead a team of approximately 11 engineers focused on Tier 2 operational support for platform engineering services running in Appian Cloud.
• Define and enforce onboarding requirements for new features entering production, including runbooks, operational scripts, and support documentation.
• Establish operational standards and processes that ensure no feature ships without proper support readiness — regardless of where it was built.
• Serve as the escalation path beyond Tier 1 / Solutions Engineering for complex incidents and infrastructure recovery efforts.
• Partner with infrastructure and development teams in Chennai, the US, Europe, and Australia to ensure features are supportable and well‑documented.
• Drive operational hygiene across the platform, closing gaps in feature supportability for existing services.
• Manage deployments and operational access for restricted environments (e.g., FedRAMP/Gov Cloud) where development teams lack direct access.
• Mentor team members on Dev Ops best practices, incident management, and operational maturity.

• Proven experience building and leading a Dev Ops or Tier 2 / Tier 3 operational support team (not just managing one — building one from scratch).
• 7+ years in Dev Ops, SRE, or production operations, with at least 3 years in a people leadership role at the senior manager level or above.
• 7+ years in Software Engineering with a proven track record of delivery.
• Deep experience defining operational onboarding standards — runbooks, documentation gates, deployment checklists — for multi‑team engineering organizations.
• Hands‑on familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS strongly preferred), Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure‑as‑code.
• Must be a US Citizen or US Permanent Resident.
• Strong experience supporting distributed systems at scale, including incident response and recovery coordination; experience working across globally distributed teams and time zones; experience with FedRAMP, Gov Cloud, or other restricted deployment environments.

Platform Engineering is scaling rapidly, with features being developed across four continents. Without a dedicated support organization enforcing operational hygiene, the gap between shipping features and supporting them in production will become unsustainable. This role is the keystone hire that sets the direction for how we operationalize platform reliability at scale.

$175,000–$350,000 USD.

The base salary range represents a good faith and reasonable estimate of the range at the time of posting. Actual compensation will be dependent on a number of factors including, but not limited to, the candidate’s relevant work experience, qualifications, internal peer equity, and market and business conditions that exist when extending an offer. A discretionary bonus may be awarded in recognition of individual and company performance.

In addition, Appian provides generous benefits offerings that include a 401(k) plan with company match, flexible time off, paid parental leave, medical, dental, and vision plans, life insurance, disability insurance, wellness programs, flexible spending accounts, health savings account contributions, an employee referral bonus program, and learning and development resources. Certain positions may be eligible for equity awards. Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation, commission, bonus, or benefit plans.

Training and Development:
During onboarding, we focus on equipping new hires with the skills and knowledge for success through department‑specific training. Continuous learning is a central focus at Appian, with dedicated mentorship and the…