Lead Applied AI Engineer: Enterprise Automation Leader

Socket.dev; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) plan with company match

Paid parental leave

Medical, dental, and vision plans

Job summary

Appian seeks a Lead Applied AI Engineer to build AI systems that understand, model, and rebuild enterprise applications, powering AI automation for the world’s largest enterprises. This role is based at our headquarters in McLean, VA, with a policy emphasizing in-office collaboration.

You will drive end-to-end AI systems for agents, orchestration, specification extraction, and rigorous evaluation, shaping engineering practices and documentation across the department.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of relevant software development experience with a BS (or 5+ years with MS).
• Strong distributed-systems background, including retries, idempotency, partial failure, long-running tasks, and recovery.
• Strong software engineering, data-pipeline, and observability skills, comfortable owning a production service end to end.
• 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.
• Exceptional ability to communicate highly technical architectures verbally, visually, and in writing to diverse engineering audiences.

Responsibilities

• Develop Clean Software: Architect, build, and optimize production AI systems while keeping a strong hands-on technical presence.
• Build Production Agents: Design reliable agents and orchestration — planning, tool use, memory, and state — with safe, permission-aware boundaries.
• Extract Specifications from Existing Systems: Derive requirements and executable specs from source, metadata, tests, and runtime behavior, and map them onto Appian's object model.
• Model Application Intelligence: Build the semantic and dependency models and retrieval that give AI accurate context across large application estates.
• Prove Correctness with Evaluation: Build the evaluation and CI pipelines that gate quality and catch real regressions.
• Engineer with AI: Use AI coding tools fluently to ship faster without compromising quality or correctness.
• Optimize Performance & Scale: Engineer reliability, latency, and efficiency into core systems at enterprise scale.
• Mentor & Champion Talent: Coach and guide junior engineers to accelerate their technical growth.
• Influence Technical Documentation: Share expertise across the department and publish to Engineering's permanent documentation site.

Skills

Distributed systems expertise

Software engineering

AI coding assistants experience

Communication skills

Education

BS in Computer Science or related field

MS in Computer Science or related field

Tools

AI tooling

Job description

Appian seeks a Lead Applied AI Engineer to build AI systems that understand, model, and rebuild enterprise applications, powering AI automation for the world’s largest enterprises. This role is based at our headquarters in McLean, VA, with a policy emphasizing in-office collaboration.

You will drive end-to-end AI systems for agents, orchestration, specification extraction, and rigorous evaluation, shaping engineering practices and documentation across the department.