Senior Sofware Engineer

Appian Corporation•McLean, VA

About The Position

As a Senior Software Engineer working on the Appian platform, your mission will be to ensure Appian is always fast, scalable and up to whatever tasks our customers configure it to do. You will be focused on designing, developing, and maintaining complex software systems while providing technical leadership and mentorship and building a product capable of serving our customers in ways you never imagined. This role includes not just deep coding expertise, but also a focus on system orchestration, using AI Tools and AI integration (like RAG, agentic workflows, MCP), and aligning technical decisions with business strategy.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.
5+ years of experience in software engineering.
Leverage knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and design patterns to write software in a full-stack Java & web technology environment.
Proven track record in building and scaling distributed systems, preferably in cloud-native environments.
Experience in identifying bottlenecks and optimising performance of large codebases.
Experience in AI/ML adoptability and integrating intelligent features into standard workflows.
Experience leading technical initiatives or small project groups.
Strong knowledge of enterprise application architecture.
Deep understanding of Software Engineering, Algorithms, and Data Structures.
Proficiency in at least one major programming language (Java, C++, or similar).
Hands-on experience with container technologies (Docker), orchestration frameworks (Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines.
Clear Communication: The ability to explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
Strategic Thinking: Understanding the business context—not just building "cool" tech, but building the right tech for the customer.
Mentorship: A genuine interest in levelling up the engineers around them.

Nice To Haves

Educational background from a highly selective, premier engineering institution with a focus on Computer Science fundamentals is preferred
Experience with performance monitoring tools like grafana and prometheus is preferred.
Experience with AWS cloud platforms and modern database technologies is preferred.
Experience with using AI tools and models like Amazon Q, Kiro, Claude is preferred.

Responsibilities

Set and enforce the "gold standard" for clean, maintainable, and well-documented code across the repository.
Leading high-level design sessions, choosing architectural patterns (Microservices, Serverless, Event-driven), and ensuring systems are scalable and secure.
Create internal tooling and "Golden Paths" that abstract away the complexity of underlying infrastructure for feature teams.
Mentoring junior engineers, conducting rigorous code reviews, setting the "gold standard" for clean, maintainable, and well-documented code across the repository.
Driving features from requirement analysis through deployment. This involves breaking down complex business goals into manageable technical tasks.
Debugging the "un-debuggable"—handling production outages, optimizing performance bottlenecks, and solving high-level logic issues.
Drive feature development by Collaborating within and across teams with stakeholders like Product Owners.