Lead Applied AI Engineer — Enterprise AI Orchestration

Appian; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) plan with company match

Flexible time off

Paid parental leave

Medical

Dental

Vision plans

Life insurance

Disability insurance

Wellness programs

Flexible spending accounts

Health savings account contributions

Employee referral bonus

Tuition reimbursement

ESPP

Job summary

Appian seeks a Lead Applied AI Engineer to drive enterprise AI systems from end to end, spanning agents, orchestration, and specification extraction across large application estates. You will shape production depth in multiple AI domains and grow into broader areas while delivering high-quality, scalable solutions.

You will work in a team focused on AI-powered process automation, with a strong emphasis on reliability, observability, and collaboration in an enterprise setting based in McLean, VA.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software development with a BS or 5+ years with an MS.
• Strong distributed-systems background including retries, idempotency, partial failure, long-running tasks, and recovery.
• Experience evaluating AI-generated code in production engineering contexts.
• Exceptional ability to communicate highly technical architectures verbally, visually, and in writing.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and optimize production AI systems with a hands-on approach.
• Design reliable agents and orchestration with safe boundaries.
• Derive requirements and specs from source, metadata, tests, and runtime behavior for Appian models.
• Build semantic and dependency models for enterprise-scale AI context.
• Develop evaluation pipelines and CI to gate quality and catch regressions.
• Use AI coding tools fluently to ship faster without sacrificing quality.
• Improve reliability, latency, and efficiency for enterprise-scale systems.
• Mentor junior engineers to accelerate technical growth.
• Contribute to technical documentation across Engineering.

Skills

Distributed systems

Observability

AI coding assistants

Production services

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

Master of Science in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Salesforce

ServiceNow

Job description

Appian seeks a Lead Applied AI Engineer to drive enterprise AI systems from end to end, spanning agents, orchestration, and specification extraction across large application estates. You will shape production depth in multiple AI domains and grow into broader areas while delivering high-quality, scalable solutions.

You will work in a team focused on AI-powered process automation, with a strong emphasis on reliability, observability, and collaboration in an enterprise setting based in McLean, VA.