Lead Site Reliability Engineer

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 Lead Site Reliability Engineer at Appian, you will drive the resolution of customer escalations, working closely with our support and product teams, and to drive changes that will improve our organization overall. 

Appian’s Site Reliability Group is focused on driving the adoption of Site Reliability Engineering principles and practices at Appian, improving performance and reliability of mission-critical Appian services, and building tools to reduce toil and mean time to recovery. Our SRE group also builds and operates a global observability platform which monitors Appian deployments across all regions. 

As a member of our centralized and dedicated SRE team, you will play a key role in integrating new tools and ideas to continuously develop and improve our best practices. The SREs on this team are responsible for working with our monitoring and observability tools, troubleshooting incidents, driving automation, and implementing preventative actions.

How you’ll contribute:

• Support our customers, responding to escalation from our customer support department, so that customers are able to use our product fully at all times.
• Suggest and prioritize new services and tools we should introduce to streamline our customer support processes in order to meet our Service Level Agreements sustainably.
• Participate as a key team member, providing code reviews, feedback on designs, and mentoring junior developers. 
• Be a strong individual contributor to software projects, implementing core aspects and providing feedback on their purpose, desired outcomes, and business impact
• Contribute to the definition of Service Level Agreements for critical services, driving adoption and helping squads meet those agreements sustainably.
• Align with feature squads and our customer support department to understand our customer needs and set appropriate expectations.
• Promote features and practices that strengthen and enable a culture of continuous improvement.

About you:

• You have 6+ years experience as a Site Reliability engineer or other DevOps based role 
• You have strong communication, negotiation, and collaboration skills; ability to convey complex, emergent, problems in a way that lets us focus on solving the root cause of the problem, rather than its symptoms.
• You have a proven ability to make difficult decisions about what to prioritize and what to ignore. You identify where you can make the most beneficial impact for our customers and continue working until that benefit has been achieved.
• You’re passionate about adding data to our processes where it’s missing so that we can gain insight in to where our problems are
• Strong skills in one or more scripting languages (JavaScript, Python, Bash or equivalent)
• Strong skills in programming and debugging a complex Java application deployed in an application server
• Familiarity with modern observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, or equivalent)
• You’re analytical by nature with an innate ability to understand and solve failures due to complex system interactions.
• You understand the value of open-source technologies, how they add capabilities that we would not want to build and maintain ourselves, and know how to get them deployed and adopted in a mature software development environment.
• Most importantly, you’re passionate about keeping the customers we have happy with our product!

Education:

B.S. in Computer Science, or a related field, M.S. preferred

About Us:

Appian helps organizations build apps and workflows rapidly, with a low-code automation platform. Combining people, technologies, and data in a single workflow, Appian can help companies maximize their resources and improve business results. Many of the world’s largest organizations use Appian applications to improve customer experience, achieve operational excellence, and simplify global risk management and compliance. Our employees create opportunities to drive hands-on impact both with our customers and throughout the organization, which creates an environment where meaningful work is met with career growth and opportunity. As a result, we are proud to have been recognized as a Washington Post Top Workplace for seven consecutive years. Simply put, we are changing the way businesses operate and our employees are to thank for Appian’s success.

Appian Corporation is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, age, or any other characteristic protected by law. Further, Appian will not discriminate against applicants for inquiring about, discussing or disclosing their pay or, in certain circumstances, the pay of their co‐worker, Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination.  

If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please contact us by email at [email protected] and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. Requests for accommodation will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Please note that only inquiries concerning a request for reasonable accommodation will be responded to from this email address.

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