Software Engineering Journey @ Appian

Lead Cloud Engineer (April 5, 2018 - Oct 1, 2020)
Senior Cloud Engineer (August 1, 2016 - April 4, 2018): Received MVP 2017 for Exceptional Work with Data Analytics Platform
Cloud Engineer (June 30, 2015 - July 31, 2016)
Associate Cloud Engineer (July 7, 2014 - June 30, 2015)

Appian Corporation, Tysons, VA

Appian builds enterprise software for process automation and AI.

Hands-on engineering alongside leadership

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 redesign from Appian's process engine to a stateless, API-based agent harness and the adoption of open-source agentic backends and harnesses, making platform changes easier to deploy. Stateless refers to the harness service boundary, not the entire platform or its durable state. Explore the recent agentic work →

My current role still includes direct implementation: I personally built a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server prototype, participated in architecture walkthroughs, and co-developed the long-term strategy for agent memory, guardrails, MCP, execution, and tools. For the AI-assisted development program, I personally built Terraform/AWS infrastructure and co-developed deployment controls.

AI engineering skills: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), retrieval and context pipelines, LangChain, LangGraph, vector and graph databases, and Azure AI Foundry.

Lead Cloud Engineer (April 5, 2018 - Oct 1, 2020)

Technical lead for Appian Cloud's Shared Infrastructure squad, covering the web layer, monitoring, analytics, centralized logging, and routing. Owned the backlog and roadmap and coached direct reports on growth and career development.

Shared Infrastructure: engineering practices and team growth

From 2018–2020, I combined ownership of the backlog and roadmap with technical mentoring and direct engineering. I introduced primary and secondary review ownership for code and design reviews, helped grow the squad from four to seven members in 2019, and contributed monitoring-processing race-condition fixes and automated log-configuration tooling.

I helped launch the Cloud internship program, developed its week-long training, and supported interns through design, testing, deployment, and validation. Team-health and career-feedback surveys led to individual discussions about workflow pain points and project ownership.

Operational data: platform collaboration and reporting ownership

I co-developed the operational data platform with Cloud Architecture and Technical Intelligence and personally designed and implemented its reporting layer. Company-wide cloud-performance reports exposed more than 100 operational metrics, giving engineers shared visibility into infrastructure health and performance trends.

Migration, logging, and auditable operations

As a Cloud Engineer in 2015–2016, I spearheaded on-premises-to-cloud migration tooling and operating procedures. I built a Java utility for secure data transfer through AWS, database-migration scripts, and validation checks; personally handled an initial migration; and trained engineers to use the process. Centralized logging collected data across thousands of servers.

Earlier, I led development of the uptime/SLA tracking application using Appian, SAIL, and MySQL, combining monitoring and change-management data to distinguish scheduled and unscheduled downtime. Site backload, revert, and clone workflows added automation, auditing, and approval steps. The individual systems and their operating context are described below.

Cloud engineering foundations | Jul 2014–Apr 2018

The projects below span my Associate Cloud Engineer, Cloud Engineer, and Senior Cloud Engineer roles. I received the Cloud & Community Services Department MVP award in January 2017.

Built a custom Auto-scaling Web Layer service to add or reduce web-layer capacity around the platform’s operating requirements.
Built Elastic Web Layer service for automatically starting and stopping web servers with the click of a button. The deployment of web servers would take several hours but now can be done in minutes.
Co-developed a data storage and analytics platform with real-time streaming of billions of data points daily into data lakes used across departments for analytics and machine learning.
Earned the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional credential in June 2017, building on hands-on experience with fault-tolerant, cost-effective, scalable cloud systems.
Led customer migrations from on-premises systems to Appian Cloud, building Java, AWS, and Bash tooling to automate migration steps.
Served as the primary contact with AWS for mission-critical issues.
Developed centralized logging framework for collection and storage of metrics from thousands of servers across the world.
Led these application projects with cloud management, architects, and senior engineers, from requirements through deployment, using Appian BPM, the SAIL interface language, and MySQL:
- Server Metrics Performance Trends — Real-time reporting across Appian Cloud application, engine, and MySQL servers, reducing diagnosis time by correlating server-health and performance trends.
- Monitoring — Redesigned and implemented the front end and notification system for cloud-instance health monitoring and proactive incident response.
- Tracking Total Uptime — Tracked production uptime/SLA using monitoring data for unscheduled downtime and change-management data for scheduled downtime.
- Customer Site Revert, Clone and Backload — Automated site recovery, cloning, and data transfer from backups for disaster recovery, internal testing, and customer support.
Developed cloud training and knowledge-base materials for engineers, including new senior cloud and technical support engineers.
Performed root-cause analysis and coordinated fixes across departments for Appian Cloud system issues.
Administered AWS cloud integrations, authentication, monitoring, networking, and storage, including SSO/SAML, VPN, and LDAP.