Lead Applied AI Engineer

Job overview

The Lead Applied AI Engineer role is onsite in McLean, VA, at Appian’s headquarters, with five days per week in the office. The base salary range is $150,000–$300,000 per year. The role is part of Appian Engineering, which builds the company’s AI-Powered Process Automation platform for enterprise customers. The engineer serves as a technical leader building AI systems that understand and model enterprise applications. The role combines hands-on production engineering with technical practice development, mentoring, and work on agents, application intelligence, retrieval, and evaluation systems.

What you'll do

• Architect, build, and optimize production AI systems
• design reliable agents and orchestration with planning, tool use, memory, state, and permission-aware boundaries
• derive requirements and executable specifications from existing systems
• build semantic and dependency models and retrieval
• develop evaluation and CI pipelines
• use AI coding tools while maintaining quality
• optimize reliability, latency, and efficiency
• mentor junior engineers
• and contribute technical documentation.

What we're looking for

Skills & competencies

lead applied ai engineer

full-time

mclean va

appian

artificial intelligence

production agents

orchestration

enterprise applications

llm evaluation

distributed systems

mentoring

in-office five days

$150k–$300k per year

Work arrangement

• Weekend coverage required

Benefits & perks

• 401(k) with company match, flexible time off, paid parental leave, medical, dental, and vision plans, life and disability insurance, wellness programs, flexible spending accounts, health savings account contributions, referral bonuses, and learning and development resources.

Why this role

The role is based at headquarters and requires in-office work five days per week. The posting requires a bachelor’s degree and seven or more years of relevant software development experience with a bachelor’s degree, or five or more years with a master’s degree.

About the employer

Appian Corporation is hiring for this role. Industry: Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services. Sector: 51.