About this role
Architecting production AI systems, designing reliable agents with memory and state, and building semantic models that give AI accurate context across large application estates form the foundation of daily tasks in this position. Engineers in this group tackle challenges involving specification extraction, retrieval, and rigorous large language model evaluation to power automation platforms used by major enterprises globally.
Appian Corporation seeks a senior professional to serve as a technical linchpin for teams constructing systems that reason about business applications from end to end. Candidates should possess robust distributed-systems expertise and a strong background in software engineering to succeed in this collaborative, remote environment.
What you will do
- Architect, build, and optimize production artificial intelligence systems while keeping a strong hands-on technical presence.
- Design reliable agents and orchestration including planning, tool use, memory, and state with safe boundaries.
- Derive requirements and executable specifications from source, metadata, tests, and runtime behavior to map onto company object models.
- Build semantic and dependency models alongside retrieval mechanisms to provide accurate context across large application estates.
- Construct evaluation and CI pipelines that gate quality and catch real regressions in production services.
- Utilize AI coding tools fluently to ship software faster without compromising quality or correctness.
- Coach and guide junior engineers to accelerate their technical growth across the department.
- Publish technical expertise to engineering documentation sites and communicate complex architectures to diverse audiences.
What you need
- Hold a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science or a related technical or analytical discipline.
- Bring at least seven years of relevant software development experience with a bachelor's degree, or five years with a master's degree.
- Demonstrate a strong distributed-systems background covering retries, idempotency, partial failure, long-running tasks, and recovery.
- Possess robust software engineering, data-pipeline, and observability skills capable of owning production services end to end.
- Show demonstrated experience using AI coding assistants along with the ability to evaluate and coach others on generated code.
- Communicate highly technical architectures verbally, visually, and in writing to diverse engineering audiences.
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
- Paid parental leave
- Medical, dental, and vision plans
- Tuition reimbursement
- Employee Stock Purchase Program
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the remote work policy for this position?
This role is based remotely within the United States. Engineers collaborate in a fast-paced environment across distributed locations.
What is the compensation range for the Lead Applied AI Engineer?
The base salary range is between $150,000 and $300,000 USD. Actual compensation depends on relevant experience, qualifications, internal equity, and market conditions.
What technologies and systems will I be working with?
You will work on production AI systems, agent orchestration, retrieval models, and evaluation pipelines. The work also involves interacting with enterprise platforms and legacy codebases.
The application is on the official Appian Corporation careers page.
Apply on company site