Principal Software Engineer

Appian seeks a Principal Software Engineer in Chennai, India, with expertise in AWS and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to design, build, and scale cloud platforms. This role involves defining infrastructure architecture, promoting automation, mentoring engineers, and delivering secure, scalable, and cost-effective cloud solutions.

You will collaborate with platform, security, SRE, and product teams to enable self-service infrastructure provisioning and improve developer velocity.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and own cloud infrastructure architectures on AWS using IaC.
• Lead the development of reusable, versioned IaC modules.
• Build and maintain infrastructure using tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, and Ansible.
• Implement CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure provisioning.
• Drive immutable infrastructure and automated environment lifecycle management.
• Define best practices for scalability, availability, security, and cost optimization.
• Review architecture designs and code.

IaC & 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.

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, you’ll tackle complex engineering challenges. You'll be a reference to other engineers and an advisor to architecture and product management.

Responsibilities:

• Develop platform features to the highest engineering standards.
• Spike robust solutions.
• High degree of personal responsibility for team performance.
• Perform code reviews.
• Identify opportunities for code refactoring and optimizations.
• Mentor junior software engineers.
• Share expert knowledge.
• Identify technical constraints.
• Advise product management on technical opportunities.
• Collaborate with architects.
• Identify technology trends.
• Effectively communicate technical designs.
• Contribute to Appian's documentation.

This role is based in Chennai, India, and requires in-office presence. Appian offers training, development, and community. Benefits are provided.