Lead Applied AI Engineer

About the role

Join Appian Engineering as a Lead Applied AI Engineer, where you'll build AI systems that understand and model enterprise applications. You'll work in a collaborative, fast-paced environment focused on technical precision and high code quality. Your responsibilities will include developing clean software, building production agents, extracting specifications from existing systems, modeling application intelligence, proving correctness with evaluation, optimizing performance and scale, mentoring junior engineers, and influencing technical documentation. Key missions: Architect, build, and optimize production AI systems while maintaining a strong hands-on technical presence.. Design reliable agents and orchestration, planning, tool use, memory, and state, with safe, permission-aware boundaries.. Derive requirements and executable specs from source, metadata, tests, and runtime behavior, and map them onto Appian's object model. Profile: - Exceptional ability to communicate highly technical architectures verbally, visually, and in writing to diverse engineering audiences - Strong distributed-systems background, including retries, idempotency, partial failure, long-running tasks, and recovery - 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) - Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science or a related technical/analytical discipline - 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 - Strong software engineering, data-pipeline, and observability skills, comfortable owning a production service end to end - Experience with legacy codebase and workflow modernization - Expertise in code search, repository intelligence, or developer tools - We value experience with enterprise platforms such as Salesforce or ServiceNow, as these skills translate well into our Enterprise-Grade Orchestration environment