Leadership Journey @ Appian

Director & Group Lead, Agentic AI | Feb 2025–Present
Director & Group Lead, Site Reliability Engineering | Jan 2024–Jan 2025
Director & Group Lead, Cloud Services & Platform Engineering | Apr–Dec 2023
Senior Software Engineering Manager | Jan 2022–Mar 2023
Senior Cloud Software Manager | Oct 2020–Jan 2022
Lead Cloud Engineer | Apr 2018–Oct 2020

Director & Group Lead, Agentic AI | Feb 2025–Present

As Director & Group Lead, Agentic AI at Appian since February 2025, I currently lead 20 engineers and two managers. I led the teams that delivered Agent Studio, combining AI reasoning, enterprise data, and workflow orchestration. Agent Studio reached general availability in Appian 25.4, and the agentic platform now serves many production customers. The platform supports Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration for secure interoperability with external enterprise systems.

Concurrent-agent capacity increased to at least 10x its prior level per Appian single-tenant instance, with 25x the original baseline demonstrated in testing and no observed degradation in accuracy or per-agent runtime across multi-turn runs. I led the service and architecture redesign from Appian's process engine onto a new AI platform with a stateless, API-based agent harness. I led the adoption of open-source agentic backends and harnesses for the redesigned services, which makes changes easier to deploy and keeps the teams positioned to benefit from the evolving open-source ecosystem.

Separately from that runtime work, I identified critical architectural gaps in the inherited Agent Studio design and applied Team Topologies to restructure 4 teams — establishing stream-aligned, enabling, platform, and complicated-subsystem teams with an API-first architecture. This enabled parallel development for AI application creation (Composer), process mining, and robotic process automation (RPA), with teams coordinating dependencies through explicit API contracts.

I build enterprise agents that combine generative AI with controlled workflows, guardrails, governance, and auditing. I focus the group on deterministic process controls around nondeterministic LLM behavior, including permissions, human review, and execution auditing. The stateless harness describes a service boundary; durable state and the surrounding process controls remain.

I led AI-assisted development rollout to 800 engineers in six months using Amazon Q Developer and Kiro, work recognized with the Appian Impact Award for boosting developer productivity across the department. I personally built Terraform/AWS infrastructure and co-developed deployment controls, combining technical implementation with company-wide enablement. Three Appian Talks culminated in “Context is King,” a hands-on workshop developed with partners across three groups to teach team-specific context for AI coding assistants.

Key projects and accomplishments:

Agent Studio: Increased concurrent-agent capacity to at least 10x its prior level per Appian single-tenant instance, with 25x the original baseline demonstrated in testing and no observed degradation in accuracy or per-agent runtime across multi-turn runs, by leading the move from Appian's process engine to a stateless, API-based agent harness. Led the teams from beta to GA in Appian 25.4; the platform now serves many production customers, with modular services supporting cross-product AI capabilities.
Organization design: Restructured four teams using Team Topologies, with shared API governance and contract-first, mock-first parallel delivery.
AI-Assisted Development: Personally built Terraform/AWS infrastructure and co-developed CI/CD deployment controls. Rolled out to 800 engineers in 6 months. Delivered 3 Appian Talks ("Releasing Amazon Q", "Make Boring Less Boring with Q", "Context is King: Build Your Own Custom Assistant").
Appian Impact Award — December 2025 — presented by Engineering Department Head for cross-organizational AI adoption and enablement.
Rated "Exceptional" (top 15%) in the 2025 and H1 2026 review cycles.

Recent practice: architecture, delivery, and team development

In 2026, I continued to pair organization leadership with hands-on technical work. I personally built an MCP Server prototype and participated directly in architecture walkthroughs. I co-developed the longer-term architecture for memory, guardrails, MCP, execution, and tools, treating these as reusable services for Composer, Process Mining, and RPA.

I introduced parallel AI-assisted development workflows in the Agentic AI group: coaching teams on agentic tools in daily workflows, coordinating parallel workstreams around shared API boundaries, and assessing delivery confidence and capacity gaps. Over one year, my own team tripled its delivered feature scope, measured in developer-weeks of work and total team output. Team cohesion and knowledge sharing are part of that operating practice. The group reached the department’s #1 AI-assisted development adoption position.

Earlier in the program, Agent Studio's beta was Appian’s most popular by interest: 148 organizations expressed interest; 22 participated, building 257 agents. Read the Agent Studio case study →

Director & Group Lead, Site Reliability Engineering | Jan 2024–Jan 2025

Placed by CTO to lead reliability turnaround when top enterprise customers questioned production-grade reliability. I was the Director and Group Lead for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at Appian, responsible for product security, performance, reliability, and availability. My organization comprised 46 people across five teams and five managers.

Key accomplishments:

Stabilized production reliability for Appian's enterprise cloud platform serving Fortune 500 customers.
Worked with the team to cut mean time to recovery (MTTR) for critical outages from 9 hours to under 3, using a global on-call model and a structured incident command process.
Worked with the team to develop and enable real-time synthetic monitoring, taking detection and recovery for many common site-unavailability cases from about an hour on average to under 15 minutes.
Personally hired and coached approximately 10 senior engineering leaders and senior managers, building the leadership bench that carried the turnaround.
Created and staffed a specialized team to own incident response for services and components with no existing owning team, closing an ownership gap. I coached that team on SRE first principles so it could resolve customer incidents promptly while still dedicating more than 50% of its time to automation.
Enabled teams to deliver automated CVE remediation and incident-artifact creation, with reliability ownership spanning Designer and Records.
Created Site Reliability Academy -- 3-week hands-on onboarding program.
Reorganized the group to address imbalances and reduce burnout. Zero regretted attrition during the SRE tenure.
Led evaluation of external monitoring platforms (BetterStack, Datadog, New Relic) and secured leadership alignment for the observability roadmap.
Established SDLC maturity standards across all SRE teams.
Managed 19 direct reports temporarily with zero attrition.
Maintained 3.90 GPA in MS program while leading full-time.

Reliability outcomes during the tenure

Across the same tenure, customer satisfaction improved on two measures: performance-related satisfaction rose from 67% to 80%, and satisfaction with product features rose from 83% to 90%, measured from Q1 2024 to 2025.

The team strengthened customer trust through faster, transparent incident resolution. Appian reported 117% cloud subscription revenue retention as of September 30, 2024.

Building an SRE operating model

I developed execution plans connecting initiatives to business value, timelines, and delivery confidence. Biweekly team meetings surfaced blockers; operational-excellence reviews and KPI reporting aligned reliability work with engineering priorities. The three-week Site Reliability Academy gave engineers hands-on preparation before production-level projects.

I partnered with information security, platform, and solution teams to give incident responders direct access to customer logs and sites. Hiring and coaching senior leaders, manager coaching, personalized learning plans, and promotion discussions supported the shift toward software automation.

Director & Group Lead, Cloud Services & Platform Engineering | Apr–Dec 2023

After serving as Senior Software Engineering Manager and functional group lead from January 2022 through March 2023, I became Director & Group Lead, Cloud Services & Platform Engineering in April 2023. My group developed Appian's cloud infrastructure and ran almost all production workloads. I aligned five autonomous squads (approximately 50 direct and indirect reports) around customer and engineering outcomes. From 2022–2023, I led the delivery and migration from a monolithic/hub-spoke cloud architecture to a cloud-native architecture.

Key accomplishments:

Stratus cloud-native migration: Led the architecture and delivery of Appian's next-generation cloud platform, eliminating 7 categories of outages through architectural improvements.
HITRUST compliance: Led the group whose web-layer controls completed HITRUST readiness work in one sprint, supporting the broader certification effort.
FedRAMP requirements: Partnered with engineering, architecture, and information security on FedRAMP requirements.
Global expansion: Expanded Appian Cloud to 21 global regions to serve enterprise customers worldwide.

Senior Software Engineering Manager | Jan 2022–Mar 2023

As functional Group Software Development Lead for Cloud Services, I aligned five squads and approximately 50 direct and indirect reports around customer outcomes, operational needs, and the cloud-native migration. I coached engineering leaders on careers and team growth while preserving squad autonomy and coordinating priorities and dependencies.

Growing the cloud organization

I established the Cloud Native team in Chennai, hiring six developers and a senior manager and defining its mission, roadmap, and operating model. I shifted incident response from a group-wide rotation to service-team ownership so development, maintenance, and operations sat with the same team.

Through the Engineering People Council, I helped implement promotion competency frameworks and led development of competency maps for technical mentors, managers, and senior managers. Read the cloud-native migration case study →

Senior Cloud Software Manager | Oct 2020–Jan 2022

Led 12 engineers with 6 direct reports, setting the team's vision and roadmap and serving as principal recruitment lead. Provided technical leadership, coaching, and career development.

Lead Cloud Engineer | Apr 2018–Oct 2020

As technical lead for Shared Infrastructure, I owned backlog, roadmap, and prioritization across the web layer, monitoring, analytics, centralized logging, and routing. I helped the squad grow from four to seven members in 2019 and introduced primary and secondary review ownership to reduce code- and design-review bottlenecks.

I helped launch the Cloud internship program and developed its week-long training. Recurring team-health and career-feedback surveys, followed by individual discussions, informed mentoring and workflow improvements. I also kept contributing directly to engineering, including log-configuration tooling and monitoring race-condition fixes. Explore the implementation work →

Appian Corporation, Tysons, VA

Appian builds enterprise software for process automation and AI.