Lead AI Developer Tooling Engineer
About this role
Appian Corporation needs a technical leader to build the developer tools, IDE integrations, and CI/CD workflows that empower internal engineers to deliver enterprise AI automation at scale. Developers on this team design the foundational infrastructure and developer experience that brings AI capabilities directly into daily coding workflows.
Appian Corporation operates out of McLean, Virginia, maintaining an in-person collaboration model requiring employees to be in the office five days a week. Candidates who thrive in this environment enjoy direct teamwork, technical precision, continuous learning, and mentoring junior engineers while driving engineering best practices across the department.
What you will do
- Architect, build, and optimize developer-facing tools and services while maintaining a strong personal technical presence on the team.
- Design IDE integrations, CLIs, code-analysis, and CI/CD tooling that internal engineers rely on daily.
- Use AI coding tools as a force multiplier to generate, review, and evaluate AI-assisted code.
- Surface AI capabilities to developers through fast, understandable, and debuggable workflows.
- Manage availability, latency, and efficiency of developer tooling through advanced system tuning and reliability engineering.
- Perform meticulous code reviews and build automation frameworks to prevent problem recurrence.
- Coach, mentor, and guide junior engineers on software craftsmanship and technical proficiency.
- Share domain knowledge across the department and publish high-quality content to Engineering’s documentation site.
What you need
- Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science or a related technical or analytical discipline.
- Seven or more years of relevant software development experience with a Bachelor's degree, or five or more years with a Master's degree.
- Experience building IDE, CLI, code-analysis, CI/CD, or developer-experience tools.
- Working knowledge of local and 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 evaluating AI-generated code in a production environment.
- 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.
Nice to have
- Strong experience developing and operating services on public cloud infrastructure
- Experience with enterprise platforms such as Salesforce or ServiceNow
Benefits
- 401(k) plan with company match
- Flexible time off
- Paid parental leave
- Medical, dental, and vision plans
- Life and disability insurance
- Tuition reimbursement
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the remote policy for this role?
This role is based at the headquarters in McLean, Virginia. Employees hired for this position are expected to be in the office 5 days a week to foster an in-person collaboration culture.
What is the salary range for this position?
The base salary range represents a good faith and reasonable estimate of $150,000 — $300,000 USD at the time of posting. Actual compensation depends on relevant work experience, qualifications, internal peer equity, and market and business conditions.
What technologies and tools will I work with?
You will serve as a technical linchpin for the team building IDEs, CLIs, code-analysis, and CI/CD workflows, while using AI coding tools fluently as a force multiplier.
What growth and development opportunities are available?
Appian provides a leadership program for new and aspiring managers, specialized department training through Appian University, skills-based training, and tuition reimbursement.
The application is on the official Appian Corporation careers page.
Apply on company site