Senior Product Manager - API's

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.

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 re-architecting existing subsystems into modern, API-first components. You will be responsible for the direction and roadmap of several of these components to ensure backward compatibility, reliability, high-performance operations, and extensibility.

This role requires a unique blend of technical curiosity and strategic reasoning: you aren't just managing a backlog; you are analyzing how our systems should be rebuilt to support a future of AI-driven process automation.

Responsibilities:

System Modernization & API Definition: Partner with engineering to deconstruct existing subsystems and define modern, scalable Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). You will ensure these interfaces are robust, performant, and future-proof.

Comparative Analysis: Evaluate current architectural patterns against industry standards. You will perform trade-off analyses (latency vs. flexibility, cost vs. speed) to determine the optimal path for modernization.

Strategic Alignment (IMP): Use the Impact-Metrics-Plans framework to ensure design decisions map to Appian’s goals for process automation, data fabric capabilities, or AI throughput.

Collaborative Discovery: Work closely with stakeholders in both Chennai and the US to understand how backend changes will impact the development experience for designers using our platform.

Backlog Excellence: Manage the release and sprint backlog through rigorous grooming, writing detailed specifications that leave no room for ambiguity.

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: 3–5 years of experience in Product Management, ideally within a technical or platform-oriented domain.

Technical at Heart: You have a strong technical background, understanding backend system interactions, and experience defining and documenting APIs. While you don't need to write the cod