Lead AI Developer Tooling Engineer

Lead AI Developer Tooling Engineer

Grow your engineering career building the developer tools that power AI automation for the world's largest enterprises.

This role is based at our ​h​eadquarters 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. 

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 AI Developer Tooling Engineer, you will serve as a technical linchpin for the team building the tools Appian's own engineers rely on — IDEs, CLIs, code-analysis, and CI/CD workflows — and the layer that brings AI capabilities into their daily development. Equipped with cutting-edge AI tooling yourself, you'll design and deliver developer experiences 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 developer-facing tools and services while maintaining a strong personal technical presence on the team.

• Build Developer Tooling: Design and build the IDE integrations, CLIs, code-analysis, and CI/CD tooling that Appian's engineers rely on every day — treating developer experience as a first-class product.

• Engineer with AI: Use AI coding tools fluently as a force multiplier: generating, reviewing, and critically evaluating AI-assisted code to ship faster without compromising quality or correctness.

• Surface AI in Developer Workflows: Expose AI capabilities to developers through workflows that are fast, understandable, and debuggable — earning trust by making AI assistance transparent and easy to control.

• Optimize Performance & Scale: Manage the availability, latency, and efficiency of developer tooling by engineering deep reliability into it and performing advanced system tuning.

• Drive Engineering Excellence: Radiate development best practices across the department, perform meticulous code reviews on design and implementation, and build automation frameworks to prevent problem recurrence.

• Mentor & Champion Talent: Actively coach, mentor, and guide junior engineers on software craftsmanship, providing the structural support necessary to accelerate their technical proficiency.

• Influence Technical Documentation: Share your expert domain knowledge regularly across the department, building a reputation as a vital resource and publishing high-quality content to Engineering’s permanent documentation site.

• 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).

• Experience building IDE, CLI, code-analysis, CI/CD, or developer-experience tools.

• Working knowledge of local/remote execution, telemetry, privacy, and enterprise deployment constraints.

• Strong language-server, parser, build-system, source-control, and diagnostics experience.

• 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.

• Proven experience developing, optimizing, and maintaining a high-volume, mission-critical production service environment.

• Exceptional ability to communicate highly technical architectures verbally, visually, and in writing to diverse engineering audiences.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Strong experience developing and operating services on public cloud infrastructure.

• We value experience with enterprise platforms such as Salesforce or ServiceNow, as these skills translate well into our Enterprise-Grade Orchestration environment.

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.