AI Security Engineer

The posting, as Appian wrote it

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.

AI Security Engineer (Agentic SOC)

Location: McLean, VA | On-site (5 days/week)

ABOUT THE TEAM

The Appian Information Security department continuously evaluates the global threat landscape to protect Appian operations and service offerings. Our mission is to build, monitor, and scale robust security tools and processes that shield critical corporate and customer assets from emerging threats, international security concerns, and vulnerabilities, ensuring our AI-Powered Process Automation platform remains resilient and secure.

THE OPPORTUNITY

At Appian, we believe our greatest innovations spring from in-person collaboration. Joining our team at our McLean headquarters means you will work alongside elite security architects in a high-velocity environment that prioritizes your professional growth. This role offers an unparalleled launchpad to transition academic knowledge into real-world impact, giving you direct ownership over intrusion detection capabilities and cloud-based defense strategies for our Enterprise-Grade Orchestration ecosystem.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Build & Deploy Agents: Design, test, and deploy autonomous and semi-autonomous AI agents that integrate natively with our enterprise security stack (SIEM, EDR, XDR, and Threat Intel feeds).
• Code the Playbooks: Translate traditional, human-centric SOC playbooks and analyst workflows into deterministic and heuristic agentic pipelines (using DAGs and multi-agent routing).
• Optimize RAG Pipelines: Design, optimize, and maintain production-grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflows to inject real-time security context, network topology, and historical incident logs into agent prompts.
• LLM Performance Engineering: Continuously evaluate, benchmark, and optimize LLM performance, context window utilization, latency, and cost-efficiency across various models (OSS and commercial).
• Design Human-in-the-Loop (HITL): Collaborate deeply with Tier 3 Analysts and Threat Hunters to engineer seamless HITL handoff mechanisms, ensuring agents safely escalate complex anomalies to humans.
• Secure the AI: Implement robust security boundaries around our LLM architecture, mitigating risks like prompt injection, data poisoning, model tool-abuse, and addressing the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs .

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, AI, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related fields plus at least 2 years of experience developing AI and ML algorithms or technologies, OR a Master's degree in a related field plus at least 1 year o

[…]
elopment opportunities.

• Community: We’ll immerse you into our community rooted in respect starting on day one. Appian fosters inclusivity through our 8 employee-led affinity groups . These groups help employees build stronger internal and external networks by planning social, educational, and outreach activities to connect with Appianites and larger initiatives throughout the company.

Benefits

Appian offers a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your health, wellbeing, and financial future. Benefits may include health coverage, Employee Assistance Program (EAP) with free mental health support, life and disability insurance, an Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP), a retirement/pension plan, wellness dollars, tuition reimbursement, family-forming benefits and more. Benefits vary by country—please ask your Talent Acquisition contact for details specific to the location you are applying to.

About Appian

Appian provides AI automation for the most important business processes at the world’s largest organizations. Our platform is known for its unique power, reliability, and scale. We’ve been automating processes for more than 25 years and have proven expertise in enterprise operations. For more information, visit appian.com .

Follow Appian: LinkedIn , YouTube , Instagram , Facebook , and X .

Appian is an equal opportunity employer that strives to attract and retain the best talent. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.

Appian provides reasonable accommodations to applicants in accordance with all applicable laws. If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please contact us by email at ReasonableAccommodations@appian.com . Please note that only inquiries concerning a request for reasonable accommodation will be responded to from this email address.

Appian's Applicant & Candidate Privacy Notice