Lead Applied AI Engineer

Grow your engineering career building the AI systems that understand, model, and rebuild enterprise applications — powering 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 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.

• 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.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 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.

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.