Principal Consultant

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.

Principal Technical Consultant - Chennai

We are seeking a Principal Technical Consultant to join our Performance Engineering Center our Chennai office. In this role, you will engage with customers post-sales to design, scale, and ensure the performance and reliability of software solutions built on the Appian platform. You will possess deep expertise in Performance Engineering and Performance Reliability. If you are not already, you will become a recognized expert in how Appian behaves under load, at scale, and under failure conditions. That means going beyond tooling: you will learn Appian's architecture, process engine, data fabric, and performance characteristics from the ground up, and you will build hands-on capability as an Appian Developer. The strongest contributors on this team move fluidly between their performance engineering craft and the platform they are engineering for: we hire versatile engineers, not inflexible specialists.

This role is based in our Chennai office. 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 five days a week to foster that culture and ensure we continue to thrive through shared ideas and teamwork.

What you'll bring

Success in this role requires more than technical depth, it requires engineering judgment. You have 10+ years of overall IT experience, including 7+ years of hands-on Performance Engineering and Reliability Engineering experience and/or Appian technical experience. You hold a B.Tech. or B.E. in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field. Appian Lead Developer Certification is preferred. You communicate clearly, ask "why" before prescribing solutions, and are comfortable working in teams. You understand object-oriented programming, relational database design, and SQL at a level that lets you read execution plans and diagnose slow queries, not just write them. You have built integrations using web services, and you are comfortable operating in cloud environments. Most importantly, you approach performance and reliability as engineering disciplines: you can tell signal from noise in test results, reason about system behavior under load, and translate findings into clear, actionable guidance for customers and teammates alike.

Technologies: demonstrated expertise in more than two categories required

Load Testing & Test Execution
Locust (Python-based; Appian's primary tool) Apache JMeter k6 Gatling

Monitoring & Observability
Grafana Prometheus InfluxDB or TimescaleDB Elastic Stack / ELK Datadog, Dynatrace, or New Relic

JVM & Application Performance Analysis
Java thread dump analysis (jstack, VisualVM, IBM Thread Analyzer) Heap dump analysis (Eclipse MAT, VisualVM) JVM profiling (async-profiler, YourKit, JProfiler) Flame graph interpretation GC log analysis (GCViewer, GCEasy)

Infrastructure & Cloud
AWS (EC2, CloudWatch, RDS, ELB, Auto Scaling) Docker Kubernetes Linux performance tooling (top, vmstat, iostat, netstat, sar, perf, strace)

Database Performance
SQL query analysis and execution plan reading (EXPLAIN / EXPLAIN ANALYZE) Connection pool behavior and tuning Index analysis and slow query diagnosis PostgreSQL or Oracle

Programming & Scripting
Python (Locust scripting, analysis automation, data pipelines) SQL Bash / Shell

Data Analysis
Python data stack (pandas, numpy, matplotlib, scipy) Statistical analysis (percentiles, standard deviation, confidence intervals, regression) Jupyter Notebooks

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.