Lead Applied AI Engineer - Enterprise Automation (Remote)

Appian; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) with company match

Medical, dental, and vision plans

Life insurance

Tuition reimbursement

Equity opportunities

Job summary

Appian is seeking a Lead Applied AI Engineer to architect and deliver production AI systems for enterprise applications. You will work across agents, orchestration, specification extraction, and evaluation, influencing engineering practices and documentation.

You will apply cutting-edge AI tooling, mentor junior engineers, and collaborate with teams to ensure high quality, scalable solutions in a remote US setting.

Qualifications

• Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science or a related technical/analytical discipline.
• 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).
• 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

AI tooling

Software engineering

Communication

Observability

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related

Tools

AI coding tools

Job description

Appian is seeking a Lead Applied AI Engineer to architect and deliver production AI systems for enterprise applications. You will work across agents, orchestration, specification extraction, and evaluation, influencing engineering practices and documentation.

You will apply cutting-edge AI tooling, mentor junior engineers, and collaborate with teams to ensure high quality, scalable solutions in a remote US setting.