Lead Applied AI Engineer

Who you are

• Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science or a related technical/analytical discipline
• 7+ years of relevant software development experience with a BS (or 5+ years of experience paired with a Master of Science in Computer Science or a related field)
• Strong distributed-systems background, including retries, idempotency, partial failure, long-running tasks, and recovery
• Strong software engineering, data-pipeline, and observability skills, comfortable owning a production service end to end
• Demonstrated experience using AI coding assistants and a strong ability to evaluate, coach others on, and selectively apply AI-generated code in a production engineering context
• Exceptional ability to communicate highly technical architectures verbally, visually, and in writing to diverse engineering audiences
• Expertise in code search, repository intelligence, or developer tools
• Experience with legacy codebase and workflow modernization
• We value experience with enterprise platforms such as Salesforce or ServiceNow, as these skills translate well into our Enterprise-Grade Orchestration environment

What the job involves

• Grow your engineering career building the AI systems that understand, model, and rebuild enterprise applications — powering AI automation for the world's largest enterprises
• ABOUT THE TEAM:
• Appian Engineering spans the full depth of our platform: from the foundational layers that power enterprise scale, to the AI capabilities redefining what automation can do
• We operate in a highly collaborative, fast-paced environment focused on technical precision, continuous learning, and high code quality
• By joining our team, you will solve real-world problems that directly shape how Appian delivers our AI-Powered Process Automation platform to enterprises around the world
• THE OPPORTUNITY:
• As a Lead Applied AI Engineer, you will serve as a technical linchpin for the team building AI systems that reason about enterprise applications end to end — spanning agents and orchestration, specification extraction from existing systems, application intelligence and retrieval, and rigorous LLM evaluation
• These skills are shared across the team, so you'll bring production depth in some of these areas and the range to grow into the others
• Equipped with cutting-edge AI tooling, you'll design and deliver systems of real sophistication, shape engineering practices, and deepen your expertise while ensuring flawless Enterprise-Grade Orchestration
• WHAT YOU'LL DO:
• Develop Clean Software: Architect, build, and optimize production AI systems while keeping a strong hands-on technical presence
• Build Production Agents: Design reliable agents and orchestration — planning, tool use, memory, and state — with safe, permission-aware boundaries
• Extract Specifications from Existing Systems: Derive requirements and executable specs from source, metadata, tests, and runtime behavior, and map them onto Appian's object model
• Model Application Intelligence: Build the semantic and dependency models and retrieval that give AI accurate context across large application estates
• Prove Correctness with Evaluation: Build the evaluation and CI pipelines that gate quality and catch real regressions
• Engineer with AI: Use AI coding tools fluently to ship faster without compromising quality or correctness
• Optimize Performance & Scale: Engineer reliability, latency, and efficiency into core systems at enterprise scale
• Mentor & Champion Talent: Coach and guide junior engineers to accelerate their technical growth
• Influence Technical Documentation: Share expertise across the department and publish to Engineering's permanent documentation site