Senior Quality Engineer (Infrastructure)

Here at Appian, our core values of Respect, Work to Impact, Ambition, and Constructive Dissent & Resolution define who we are. In short, this means we constantly seek to understand the best for our customers, we go beyond completion in our work, we strive for excellence with intensity, and we embrace candid communication. These values guide our actions and shape our culture every day.  When you join Appian, you'll be part of a passionate team that's dedicated to accomplishing hard things.

Senior Quality Engineers ensure the high quality and timely delivery of our software to customers. They serve as champions for the customer perspective​ - ensuring that quality is embedded into every stage of the development process. With a strong understanding of complex system interactions and dependencies, they proactively identify potential risks and work cross-functionally to address them through thoughtful design and rigorous testing. Senior Quality Engineers analyze defects and delivery gaps to drive continuous improvement, ensuring issues are not repeated and our standards of excellence are consistently upheld.

This role is based at our Headquarters in McLean, Virginia. Appian was built on a culture of in-person collaboration, which we believe is a key driver of our mission to be the best. Employees hired for this position are expected to be in the office 5 days a week to foster that culture and ensure we continue to thrive through shared ideas and teamwork. We believe being in the office provides more opportunities to come together and celebrate working with the exceptional people across Appian.

In this role, you will: 

• Manually test and troubleshoot new features from a multitude of dimensions including functional, integration, end-to-end, performance, reliability and security across cloud infrastructure like Clusters, Edge Layer, Pods/Nods, and API testing
• Write automated test code using tools like Java, Python and Selenium. Ability to apply test automation design and techniques
• Support existing features by performing regression testing when bugs are resolved
• Perform analysis, research, and troubleshooting of software defects and aid in the documentation of defects and anomalies.
• Build, maintain and improve test artifacts for rapid and efficient reuse by the Test Engineering team.
• Work with other scrum team members to define and review Acceptance Criteria.
• Participate in critical release activities for all platforms.
• Ensure complete and timely reporting of bugs and test results.
• Know and able to effectively apply test design techniques.
• Systematically analyze requirements ensuring they provide effective input into Engineering activities.
• Effectively and efficiently determine root causes of leaked defects.
• Leads and/or participates in release management activities.

​Basic Qualifications: 

• 4+ years of relevant experience (e.g., Quality, Test, Performance, or Software Engineer)
• Education: B.S. in Computer Science or related field
• Experience writing automated test code using tools like Java, Python and Selenium, bash, terraform, go
• Cloud Experience in AWS and Kubernetes. (e.g. Testing infrastructure like Clusters, Edge Layer, Pods/Nods)  
• Experience or good understanding of working with Unix OS
• They can navigate and perform troubleshooting commands independently on a Unix server

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Have familiarity with networking concepts (TCP/IP, UDP) as well as supporting networking components and know techniques of troubleshooting against this layer
• DNS, DHCP, Load Balancers
• Have awareness/experience in using monitoring tools/monitoring stack - prometheus, grafana, Alertmanager etc.,
• Experience conducting chaos engineering and resiliency testing for AWS and Kubernetes infrastructure to validate fault tolerance, scalability, and recovery.

Tools and Resources 

• Training and Development: During onboarding, we focus on equipping new hires with the skills and knowledge for success through department-specific training. Continuous learning is a central focus at Appian, with dedicated mentorship and the First-Friend program being widely utilized resources for new hires. 
• Growth Opportunities: Appian provides a diverse array of growth and development opportunities, including our leadership program tailored for new and aspiring managers, a comprehensive library of specialized department training through Appian University, skills based training, and tuition reimbursement for those aiming to advance their education. This commitment ensures that employees have access to a holistic range of development opportunities.
• Community: We’