Technical Lead / Principal Software Engineer

Technical Lead / Principal Software Engineer

Melbourne, Australia; Sydney, Australia

Appian values intensity and excellence. We set high standards and live up to them ensuring that everything we do is done with care and quality. We approach every challenge with ambition and commitment, holding ourselves and each other accountable to achieve the best results. When you join Appian, you’ll be part of a passionate team dedicated to accomplishing hard things together.

The Platform Engineering team focuses on making it easy for our service teams to build and run production systems. As an experienced engineer in Platform Engineering, you will help re-architect our platform to run on public, private, and hybrid clouds and allow for frequent, predictable and high impact changes. You will ensure that our world‑class infrastructure is always available, responsive, and capable of meeting the diverse needs of our customers.

Responsibilities

Lead a small team while remaining super technical and hands‑on, building the cloud infrastructure that powers the Appian platform. This role involves designing features that enable network connectivity between our platform and external networks, with evolving focus over time.

Qualifications

• Leverage knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and design patterns to write software in a cloud infrastructure environment, using tools such as Python, Go, Java, Terraform, Pulumi, CI/CD pipelines, RDBMS, No‑SQL DBs, etc.
• Solid knowledge of AWS services such as EKS, EC2, Lambda, DynamoDB, VPC networking, and S3 (or equivalent cloud provider experience).
• Familiarity with networking and security best practices in the cloud.
• Provide technical leadership to drive pragmatic solutions and impactful design decisions.
• Coach junior and senior engineers while championing best practices across the team.
• Review architecture/designs from team members, identify problems, and suggest better practices.
• Conduct code reviews focusing on elegant approaches, performance, maintainability, and security.
• Identify dependencies between multiple teams and communicate blockers, escalating as needed.
• Operate business‑critical production services.
• Automate on‑demand creation and configuration of cloud resources and services.
• Automate every aspect of the development lifecycle to achieve continuous delivery.
• Share advanced/expert knowledge within the department, maintaining a reputation as a key resource.
• Lead technological changes to keep the platform modern.

Basic Qualifications

• 10‑15+ years of experience designing, building, and architecting software in enterprise or SaaS/PaaS environments.
• Some leadership experience managing and mentoring a small team of junior developers.
• Advanced knowledge of at least one programming language and comfort with object‑oriented concepts.
• Hands‑on development experience in Terraform, Java, Go, Python.
• Experience driving projects to impact.
• Experience working in a Linux environment.
• Excellent spoken and written communication.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent experience.

Tools and Resources

• Dedicated learning time to master Kubernetes, AWS, Docker, Linux networking.
• Opportunities for growth and leadership.
• Engineering Indie Time (dedicated time to build personal projects) and annual hackathons.

Appian offers a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your health, wellbeing, and financial future. Benefits may include health coverage, Employee Assistance Program (EAP) with free mental health support, life and disability insurance, an Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP), a retirement/pension plan, wellness dollars, tuition reimbursement, family‑forming benefits and more. Benefits vary by country—please ask your Talent Acquisition contact for details specific to the location you are applying to.

Appian is an equal‑opportunity employer that strives to attract and retain the best talent. All qualified applicants receive consideration for employment without regard to any characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.

Appian provides reasonable accommodations to applicants in accordance with all applicable laws. If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please contact us by email at [email protected]. Only inquiries concerning a request for reasonable accommodation will be responded to from this email address.