[Hiring] Lead AI Developer Tooling Engineer @Appian Corporation

Role Description

As a Lead AI Developer Tooling Engineer, you will serve as a technical linchpin for the team building the tools Appian's own engineers rely on — IDEs, CLIs, code-analysis, and CI/CD workflows — and the layer that brings AI capabilities into their daily development. Equipped with cutting-edge AI tooling yourself, you'll design and deliver developer experiences of real sophistication, shape engineering practices, and deepen your expertise while ensuring flawless Enterprise-Grade Orchestration.

What You'll Do

• Develop Clean Software: Architect, build, and optimize developer-facing tools and services while maintaining a strong personal technical presence on the team.
• Build Developer Tooling: Design and build the IDE integrations, CLIs, code-analysis, and CI/CD tooling that Appian's engineers rely on every day — treating developer experience as a first-class product.
• Engineer with AI: 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.
• Surface AI in Developer Workflows: Expose AI capabilities to developers through workflows that are fast, understandable, and debuggable — earning trust by making AI assistance transparent and easy to control.
• Optimize Performance & Scale: Manage the availability, latency, and efficiency of developer tooling by engineering deep reliability into it and performing advanced system tuning.
• Drive Engineering Excellence: Radiate development best practices across the department, perform meticulous code reviews on design and implementation, and build automation frameworks to prevent problem recurrence.
• Mentor & Champion Talent: Actively coach, mentor, and guide junior engineers on software craftsmanship, providing the structural support necessary to accelerate their technical proficiency.
• Influence Technical Documentation: 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.

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).
• Experience building IDE, CLI, code-analysis, CI/CD, or developer-experience tools.
• Working knowledge of local/remote execution, telemetry, privacy, and enterprise deployment constraints.
• Strong language-server, parser, build-system, source-control, and diagnostics experience.
• 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.
• 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong experience developing and operating services on public cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with enterprise platforms such as Salesforce or ServiceNow, as these skills translate well into our Enterprise-Grade Orchestration environment.

Benefits

• 401(k) plan with company match.
• Flexible time off.
• Paid parental leave.
• Medical, dental, and vision plans.
• Life insurance and disability insurance.
• Wellness programs.
• Flexible spending accounts.
• Health savings account contributions.
• Employee referral bonus program.
• Learning and development resources.
• Equity awards may be available for certain positions.