Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

Here at Appian, our values of Intensity and Excellence define who we are. 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.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer with deep expertise in AWS and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to design, build, and scale highly reliable cloud platforms. This role will be responsible for defining infrastructure architecture, driving automation-first practices, and mentoring engineers while delivering secure, scalable, and cost-effective cloud solutions. You will work closely with platform, security, SRE, and product teams to enable self-service, zero-touch infrastructure provisioning and improve developer velocity across the organization.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Design and own cloud infrastructure architectures on AWS using Infrastructure as Code.
• Lead the development of reusable, versioned IaC modules and frameworks.
• 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.
• Define best practices for scalability, availability, security, and cost optimization.
• Review architecture designs and code to ensure high quality and long-term maintainability.
• Infrastructure as Code & Automation
• Enable self-service provisioning for internal teams.
• AWS Expertise
• Deep hands-on experience with AWS services including:
• Compute: EC2, Auto Scaling, EKS, ECS, Lambda
• Networking: VPC, ALB/NLB, Route 53, PrivateLink
• Storage: EBS, EFS, S3
• Security: IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager
• Design secure, compliant environments following least privilege and defense-in-depth principles.

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

This role is based at our office at WTC 11th floor, Old Mahabalipuram Road, SH 49A, Kandhanchavadi, Kottivakkam, Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600041, India. Appian was built on a culture of in-person collaboration, which we believe is a key driver of our mission to be the best. Employees hired for this position are expected to be in the office 5 days a week to foster that culture and ensure we continue to thrive through shared ideas and teamwork. We believe being in the office provides more opportunities to come together and celebrate working with the exceptional people across Appian.

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 provides process automation technology. We automate complex processes in large enterprises and governments. Our platform is known for its unique reliability and scale. We've been automating processes for 25 years and understand enterprise operations like no one else. For more information, visit appian.com. [Nasdaq: APPN]