Senior Software Engineer - Data Fabric

Overview

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. As a Senior Software Engineer working on the Appian platform, your mission will be to ensure Appian is always fast, scalable, and up to whatever tasks our customers configure it to do. You will solve problems of scale and flexibility that most engineers never see, building a product capable of serving our customers in ways you never imagined. In this role, your scope extends from the high-performance data layer to the cross-platform user interface and design tools.

Team Description

The Platform Engineering team is at the center of building Appian's high-throughput, enterprise-grade architecture. This is a squad of builders operating at the intersection of full-stack engineering, distributed systems, and real-time data processing. We don't just write code; we architect the foundational engine that powers mission-critical applications worldwide. We build, optimize, and maintain high-performance software, empowering enterprise organizations to execute complex, high-volume workloads with speed, resilience, and quality.

In this role, you will:

• Engine for Reliability & Scale: Manage the availability, latency, scalability, and overall efficiency of the product by designing high reliability and fault tolerance directly into software and systems.
• Resolve & Prevent Emergent Issues: Respond directly to high-impact technical challenges, writing robust software and building automation to prevent recurrence.
• Architect Full-Stack Features: Leverage deep knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and design patterns to build end-to-end features using Java and modern web technologies.
• Optimize High-Volume Data Systems: Design, tune, and refactor features handling complex, high-volume data structures, low-latency queries, and enterprise-grade relational databases.
• Lead Feature Design & Sizing: Act as a core contributor to technical breakdowns, story sizing, architectural discussions, and feature implementations across the squad.
• Champion Engineering Standards: Radiate software best practices, advocate for continuous code refactoring, and drive team-wide engineering velocity without sacrificing quality.

The Ideal Candidate:

• You are a Tinkerer at Heart: You have an innate curiosity and proven ability to unpack, troubleshoot, and solve labyrinthine problems within large, high-performance, real-time distributed data systems.
• Agile Mindset & Quality Focused: Agile is your mantra and quality is your goal. You take deep personal ownership over team velocity, system stability, and overall technical execution.
• Strong Technical Communicator: You easily articulate complex architectural decisions, designs, and trade-offs in writing or verbally to technical audiences.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field
• 6+ years of experience building, scaling, and delivering enterprise-grade software applications.
• Proven fluency in Java, Hibernate, RDBMS, and JDBC within a full-stack environment.
• Demonstrable experience working on systems involving large data values and high-volume data processing.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 3+ years of experience with CI/CD deployment pipelines in cloud environments (AWS) and continuous integration tools (e.g., Jenkins).
• Strong practical mastery of both object-oriented (OO) and functional programming paradigms.
• Deep knowledge of algorithms, web API design, and enterprise software design patterns.
• Proven track record leading technical breakdowns, sizing estimates, and continuous code optimization efforts within an Agile framework.