AI Security Engineer

<div class="content-intro"><p>Here at Appian, our values of <strong>Intensity </strong>and <strong>Excellence </strong>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.</p></div><p><strong>AI Security Engineer (Agentic SOC)</strong></p> <p>Location: McLean, VA | On-site (5 days/week)</p> <p><em>Are you ready to build the security systems that protect a global enterprise automation platform from modern cyber threats? As a Security Engineer, you will design and implement advanced detection technologies to shield our critical infrastructure.</em></p> <p><strong>ABOUT THE TEAM</strong></p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>THE OPPORTUNITY</strong></p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>WHAT YOU'LL DO</strong></p> <ul> <li>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).</li> <li>Code the Playbooks: Translate traditional, human-centric SOC playbooks and analyst workflows into deterministic and heuristic agentic pipelines (using DAGs and multi-agent routing).</li> <li>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.</li> <li>LLM Performance Engineering: Continuously evaluate, benchmark, and optimize LLM performance, context window utilization, latency, and cost-efficiency across various models (OSS and commercial).</li> <li>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.</li> <li>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 .</li> </ul> <p><strong>REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS</strong></p> <ul> <li>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 of experience.</li> <li>Experience: At least 2 years of experience programming with Python, Go, Scala, or Java.</li> <li>You are a