Principal Applied AI Engineer

Appian•McLean, VA

10d•Onsite

About The Position

Appian is seeking a Principal Applied AI Engineer to lead the engineering of software that matters, driving AI automation for the world's largest enterprises. This role is based at our headquarters in McLean, Virginia. Appian was built on a culture of in-person collaboration, which we believe is a key driver of our mission to be the best. Employees hired for this position are expected to be in the office 5 days a week to foster that culture and ensure we continue to thrive through shared ideas and teamwork. We believe being in the office provides more opportunities to come together and celebrate working with the exceptional people across Appian. Appian Engineering spans the full depth of our platform: from the foundational layers that power enterprise scale, to the AI capabilities redefining what automation can do. We operate in a highly collaborative, fast-paced environment focused on technical precision, continuous learning, and high code quality. By joining our team, you will solve real-world problems that directly shape how Appian delivers our AI-Powered Process Automation platform to enterprises around the world.

Requirements

Minimum of a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science or a related technical/analytical discipline. (Equivalent experience is not accepted in lieu of a degree).
10+ years of relevant software development experience with a BS (or 8+ years of experience paired with a Master of Science in Computer Science or related field).
Deep hands-on experience designing and operating production LLM systems.
Demonstrated expertise across code generation, agents, retrieval, structured generation, tool use, model routing, evaluation, and observability.
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 distributed-systems, API, security, and reliability foundations, with the ability to contribute meaningfully at a senior individual contributor level within that space.
Demonstrated ability to drive technical decisions and shape engineering practices beyond a single team or project scope.
Proven experience developing, optimizing, and maintaining a high-volume, mission-critical production service environment.
Exceptional ability to communicate highly technical architectures verbally, visually, and in writing to diverse engineering audiences.

Nice To Haves

Experience with compilers, program analysis, formal or executable specifications, or legacy modernization is strongly preferred.
Experience with enterprise platforms such as Salesforce or ServiceNow, as these skills translate well into our Enterprise-Grade Orchestration environment.

Responsibilities

Architect, build, and optimize high-performance production LLM systems while maintaining a strong personal technical presence on the team.
Spearhead strategic technological changes and champion code refactoring efforts to keep the core Appian codebase — and the AI systems built on it — cutting-edge, modern, and performant.
Use AI coding tools fluently as a force multiplier: generating, reviewing, and critically evaluating AI-assisted code to ship faster without compromising quality or correctness.
Drive technical story breakdowns, acceptance criteria, and architectural design across complex, multi-tier and AI-powered application layers — from feature scoping through implementation.
Build prototypes to de-risk novel AI approaches and establish the standards others build on.
Manage product availability, latency, scalability, and efficiency by engineering deep reliability into our core software systems and performing advanced system tuning.
Radiate development best practices across the department, perform meticulous code reviews on design and implementation, and build automation frameworks to prevent problem recurrence.
Actively coach and mentor engineers at multiple levels, identify and close skill gaps on the team, and take ownership of accelerating the technical growth of those around you.
Share your expert domain knowledge regularly across the department, building a reputation as a vital resource and publishing high-quality content to Engineering’s permanent documentation site.