Senior Software Engineer

As an SSE, you will contribute to the design and development of platform components, work closely with architects and lead engineers, and play a key role in ensuring high-quality, reliable, and efficient platform solutions.

Required Skills:

• 6–9 years of software engineering experience, with strong exposure to cloud-native platforms.
• Strong programming skills in Java / Python / Go.
• Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent).
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes (deployment, troubleshooting, scaling).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.
• Familiarity with observability tools (e.g., CloudWatch, logging, monitoring systems).
• Good understanding of distributed systems and microservices architecture.
• Exposure to cloud cost optimization practices is a plus.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills.
• Solid hands-on experience with AWS, including Compute (EC2, Auto Scaling, EKS/ECS, Lambda), Networking (VPC, ALB/NLB, Route 53), Storage (EBS, EFS, S3), and Security (IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager).

Key Responsibilities 

• Lead the development of reusable, versioned IaC modules and frameworks. Define best practices for scalability, availability, security, and cost optimization.
• Technical Leadership Design and own cloud infrastructure architectures on AWS using Infrastructure as Code. 
• Review architecture designs and code to ensure high quality and long-term maintainability.
• Infrastructure as Code & Automation Build and maintain infrastructure using tools such as: Terraform / CloudFormation / CDK Ansible (where applicable) Implement CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure provisioning and change management.
• Drive immutable infrastructure and automated environment lifecycle management. Enable self-service provisioning for internal teams. 

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with Kubernetes (EKS) and containerized workloads.

Familiarity with GitOps workflows.

Experience supporting regulated environments (SOC2, FedRAMP, HIPAA, etc.).

Strong understanding of cost optimization and cloud economics.

Prior experience in platform engineering or developer enablement teams.

 Responsibilities:

• Develop platform features to the highest engineering standards.

• Spike robust solutions to clear architectural runway ahead of platform feature development.

• High degree of personal responsibility for the overall performance of the team, including capabilities, quality, stability and velocity.

 • Perform code reviews which provide feedback not only on code quality, but on design and implementation.

• Seek to identify opportunities for code refactoring and performance optimizations on a regular basis and champion these efforts within the team.

• Mentor junior software engineers by sharing best-practices and providing guidance on how to become more proficient. 

• Share advanced/expert knowledge with others in the department, both on and off team; maintain a reputation as a key resource in those areas.

• Identify technical constraints to engineering effectiveness and lead initiatives to address them. • Advise product management on technical opportunities and constraints.

• Collaborate with architects to promote consistency of the platform, inspire design discipline, and continuously advance the state of Appian’s technology.

• Identify, understand, and bring to fruition technology trends and innovations relevant to Appian Platform.

• Effectively communicate technical designs verbally, visually and/or in writing for small to large sized technical audiences.

• Contribute to Appian’s long-term documentation through publishing relevant, high-quality content to Engineering’s technical documentation site