Senior Software Engineer

Overview:

At Appian, we're not only about building awesome software, but also about growing our culture of passion, energy, and innovation-great people, great software! As a performance-focused Software Engineer, your mission will be to tackle our most challenging technical problems and build the tools required to solve complex performance bottlenecks. You will work alongside brilliant engineers to ensure our real-time, distributed platform operates with maximum speed, stability, and scale.

Team Description:

The Performance Engineering team sits at the vital intersection of core software development and infrastructure reliability. We are a squad of builders dedicated to keeping Appian fast and resilient under high-volume enterprise loads. We don't just fix slow code; we construct custom performance tooling, design automated testing frameworks, and maintain the deep observability systems that keep our platform running seamlessly.

In this role, you will:

• Engine Custom Tooling: Build custom internal tools, automation scripts, and diagnostic software to identify, isolate, and eliminate complex platform bottlenecks.
• Automate Performance Testing: Create and expand libraries, frameworks, and infrastructure to enable continuous automated performance and load testing across the platform.
• Drive Deep Observability: Leverage modern observability stacks (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Loki, Grafana, ElasticSearch, and Kubernetes) to monitor, trace, and optimize real-time system behavior.
• Debug & Rapidly Respond: Act as a critical responder for complex customer performance investigations and production issues, conducting root-cause analysis to prevent recurrence.
• Optimize Core Architecture: Utilize deep JVM knowledge and Linux fundamentals to profile runtime performance, tune application servers, and optimize database queries.
• Collaborate in Agile Squads: Partner closely with cross-functional scrum teams to deliver simple, elegant, and highly performant solutions to multi-layered technical challenges.

The Ideal Candidate:

• Systems & Performance Obsessed: You thrive on solving labyrinthine problems within large, high-performance distributed systems, with a natural curiosity for low-level platform behaviors.
• Culture & Builder Mindset: You bring energy, passion, and technical rigor to your team, taking immense pride in building tools that make everyone else's code run faster.
• Proactive Problem Solver: You prefer building long-term automated preventions over repeatedly applying short-term band-aids to recurring system issues.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field
• 4+ years of professional experience building, delivering, and optimizing software applications.
• Proven experience programming in Java, Python, or other interpreted/compiled languages (e.g., C/C++).
• Solid foundation in Linux system fundamentals (threading, memory management, context switching) and shell scripting.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Deep technical knowledge of the JVM, including Garbage Collection tuning, heap dump analysis, and Java application servers (Tomcat, Spring).
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native monitoring and tracing tools (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, ElasticSearch) and load-testing tools (e.g., Locust).
• Experience with modern CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and orchestration technologies (GitLab, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes).
• Proven track record in rapid-response incident management and production-level debugging.