About this role
Appian Engineering builds foundational platform layers and AI capabilities that power the AI-Powered Process Automation platform used by enterprises globally. The engineering group is developing AI systems designed to understand, model, and rebuild enterprise applications through agents, orchestration, and semantic modeling.
As a Lead Applied AI Engineer, you will serve as a technical linchpin on a collaborative team creating agentic architectures, extraction specifications, and evaluation pipelines. Production depth across distributed systems and AI tooling will enable you to design sophisticated systems while coaching junior engineers.
Operating out of the McLean, Virginia headquarters five days a week, this position suits engineers who thrive in an in-person, high-collaboration environment. Ideal candidates bring a strong background in distributed systems, software reliability, and production-grade AI development.
What you will do
- Architect, build, and optimize production AI systems while maintaining a hands-on technical presence.
- Design reliable agents and orchestration mechanics including planning, memory, tool use, and safe state boundaries.
- Extract requirements and executable specifications from source code, metadata, runtime behavior, and tests.
- Build semantic and dependency models to give AI accurate context across large application estates.
- Develop evaluation frameworks and continuous integration pipelines to measure system quality and catch regressions.
- Engineer reliability, enterprise scale, latency efficiency, and robust data pipelines into core services.
- Mentor junior engineers and publish technical documentation to the internal engineering site.
What you need
- Hold a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science or a related technical and analytical discipline.
- Bring at least seven years of relevant software development experience alongside a Bachelor of Science, or five years with a Master of Science.
- Demonstrate a strong background in distributed systems encompassing retries, idempotency, recovery, and long-running tasks.
- Possess robust software engineering, observability, and data-pipeline capabilities to own a production service end-to-end.
- Show documented experience utilizing AI coding assistants along with the ability to evaluate and coach others on generated code.
- Communicate highly technical architectures effectively to diverse engineering audiences through verbal, visual, and written mediums.
Nice to have
- Expertise in code search, repository intelligence, or developer tools
- Experience with legacy codebase and workflow modernization
- Familiarity with enterprise platforms such as Salesforce or ServiceNow
Benefits
- 401(k) plan with company match
- Flexible time off and paid parental leave
- Medical, dental, and vision plans
- Life and disability insurance
- Flexible spending accounts and health savings account contributions
- Tuition reimbursement and learning resources
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the remote work 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 the Lead Applied AI Engineer position?
The base salary range is $150,000 to $300,000 USD. Actual compensation depends on relevant work experience, qualifications, internal peer equity, and market conditions.
What kind of technical background is required?
Candidates need a strong distributed-systems background including retries, idempotency, partial failure, and recovery. Strong software engineering, observability, and data-pipeline skills are also required.
What growth and development opportunities are available?
Appian provides a leadership program for new and aspiring managers, specialized training through Appian University, and tuition reimbursement. Continuous learning is supported through dedicated mentorship and onboarding resources.
The application is on the official Appian Corporation careers page.
Apply on company site