Lead AI Engineer — Enterprise Automation & Orchestration

Appian; Illinois; On-site; USD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Medical, dental, and vision plans

Job summary

Appian is seeking a Lead Applied AI Engineer at our McLean, Virginia headquarters to build AI systems that reason about enterprise applications end to end and shape production-grade automation for large-scale deployments.

You will lead technical efforts across agents, orchestration, specification extraction, and evaluation, while mentoring engineers and upholding enterprise reliability, performance, and high code quality.

Qualifications

• Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• 7+ years of relevant software development experience with a BS (or 5+ years with MS).
• Strong distributed-systems background and production service ownership.
• Strong software engineering, data-pipeline, and observability skills.
• Experience using AI coding assistants and evaluating AI-generated code in production.
• Excellent communication of technical architectures to diverse audiences.

Responsibilities

• Develop Clean Software: Architect, build, and optimize production AI systems with hands-on presence.
• Build Production Agents: Design reliable agents and orchestration with safe boundaries.
• Extract Specifications from Existing Systems: Derive requirements and executable specs from sources and map to Appian's model.
• Model Application Intelligence: Build semantic and dependency models for large estates.
• Prove Correctness with Evaluation: Create evaluation and CI pipelines to gate quality and catch regressions.
• Engineer with AI: Use AI coding tools to ship faster without compromising quality.
• Optimize Performance & Scale: Ensure reliability, latency, and efficiency at enterprise scale.
• Mentor & Champion Talent: Coach junior engineers to accelerate growth.
• Influence Technical Documentation: Share expertise across the department.

Skills

Distributed systems

AI tooling

Production software

Code evaluation

Mentoring

Communication

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science or related

Master of Science in Computer Science or related (preferred)

Job description

Appian is seeking a Lead Applied AI Engineer at our McLean, Virginia headquarters to build AI systems that reason about enterprise applications end to end and shape production-grade automation for large-scale deployments.

You will lead technical efforts across agents, orchestration, specification extraction, and evaluation, while mentoring engineers and upholding enterprise reliability, performance, and high code quality.