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

15+ years 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. As a Principal Software Engineer at Appian you have the intuition and knowledge to tackle the most complex engineering challenges across the Appian platform. You are a reference to other engineers as a member of feature teams and a trusted advisor to the architecture and product management functions.

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,