Lead Software Engineer

Role Summary / Overview

At Appian, we are passionate about building a culture of innovation—great people, great software. As a Lead Software Engineer (LSE) for the Appian Usage Reporting and Analytics (AURA) team, you will serve as the primary technical lead and advisor, commanding significant influence across teams and departments.

You will own the architectural evolution of our near real-time centralized logging and analytics platform. Your mission is to drive the design and execution of high-performance, distributed data systems that handle millions of daily requests, ensuring our platform is built with industry-leading performance, reliability, and scalability. As a force multiplier, you will not only deliver complex projects but also raise the technical bar for the entire organization through mentorship and principled decision-making.

Key Responsibilities

• Architectural Leadership: Own major infrastructure subsystems and drive the technical roadmap for the AURA platform, ensuring it can handle high-volume, real-time data processing.
• Execution & Delivery: Lead complex, cross-functional projects to impact, managing multiple initiatives simultaneously while ensuring high-quality, production-grade delivery.
• Mentorship & Coaching: Serve as an exceptional coach to all engineers, providing guidance on design reviews, code quality, and professional growth.
• Innovation & AI: Champion AI-first engineering adoption, integrating generative AI into the SDLC and leveraging AI to gain deeper insights from product usage logs.
• Operational Excellence: Manage the availability, latency, and efficiency of core services, building automation and alerting to prevent problem recurrence and reduce toil.
• Influence: Consistently question the status quo to drive change and new initiatives, acting as an advocate for best practices and SDLC improvements across the department.
• Collaboration: Partner with Product Managers, Executive stakeholders, and other engineering leads to maintain the team’s vision and prioritize high-impact customer benefits.

Required Qualifications

• Experience: 8 to 10+ years of relevant software development experience in product or platform organizations.
• Technical Depth: Expert-level competency in Java and building scalable, high-volume systems within distributed environments.
• Cloud Expertise: Extensive experience with AWS services (Lambda, S3, Aurora, Athena, Glue) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
• Architectural Mastery: Proven experience in designing and influencing technical direction for large-scale, real-time data systems and cloud-native architectures.
• Education: B.E. in Computer Science or a related technical discipline.
• Leadership Track Record: Demonstrated ability to lead technical teams, mentor senior engineers, and deliver measurable outcomes in a mature SDLC.