Appian Chennai is a first-in-class Software Platform Development Center in a city that predominantly focuses on the IT Services and Manufacturing sectors. As part of the Appian Chennai Engineering Team, you will have the opportunity to innovate across the Appian Platform.
My name is Wasif Akbar, and I’m the Director of Software Development at Appian. I’m leading the setup of our new platform development center in Chennai, India. Joining our team is an exciting opportunity to ideate, innovate, and collaborate with talented team members in an agile environment, in a fast growing, brand name multinational.
What can you expect joining the new team? I’ve been asked many variations of this question, and I want to share my experience at Appian, how the Engineering team is structured, and why now is an exciting time to join the growing Appian Chennai team.
High Code v Low Code v No Code.
The Appian Platform is the market leading Low Code, No Code platform, but what does that really mean?
Historically software programming was really low level programming moving bits and bytes around until the advent of programming languages such as C, C++. Then came High Code Object-Oriented languages such as Java and C# and countless supporting frameworks that abstracted the technical complexity of the previous generation.
Low Code, No Code Platforms further abstract the technical complexity by providing users with a combination of pre-built software components and designer tools for all layers. This allows Low Code developers to quickly design, drag, drop, and configure components to build simple to large scale, industrial strength solutions to automate any business process.
The Appian Platform consists of three major modules; Workflow, Robotic Process Automation and Process Mining. When engineered together, they dramatically speed up the digital transformation journey for our customers. Appian engineers work with high-code languages to build the Low-Code, No Code platform that customers use. It takes tremendous engineering creativity and innovation to create a platform that is both easy-to-use and also powerful enough to support global, enterprise use cases.
Balance between structure and agile.
I’ve worked in software engineering for more than 20 years and have worked across a broad spectrum of teams from start up to fully mature software development teams. One key challenge has always been to create Agile teams that are able to innovate at a fast pace and find a balance between Structure and Flexibility.
One of the biggest surprises I encountered with Appian is how effectively the team has implemented the principles of Agile and Agile2. The Engineering team is organized into several Business Units. Each Business Unit is further organized into Groups. Each Group is then further organized into small, agile squads of about ten team members.
Each Business Unit and Group has a head of Product, Development and Quality Engineering while Architecture, UX Design and Technical Writing are shared services across all Business Units.
The squads focus on the day to day release work, while the Groups focus on quarterly goals and the Business Units on annual goals.
Across these three layers we have a precise balance of people, process and tools that enables innovation and collaboration amongst the Chennai, Europe, Sydney, and US-based Engineering teams.
Working on the Chennai Engineering team, you’ll be connected to the global Appian community and platform ecosystem.
Build with leading edge tech.
The Chennai Engineering Team is a High Code Software Development team consisting of Product Managers, Software Developers, Quality Engineers, UX, UI Engineers and Designers. As an Engineer on Appian’s Chennai Team, you will be working with our modern tech stack and writing code in Java, Python or Selenium, or using frameworks like WebDriver, FitNesse or Locust, depending on the role. See more about our tools on our Engineering Tech Corner.
We are currently hiring for High Code Engineering across different functions to work on the Appian Platform. It is an opportunity for talented Product Managers, Quality Engineers, UX Engineers and Designers to work on a market leading, innovative platform for a fast growing, brand name, multinational.
Are you interested in being the next member of our Chennai Engineering team? Come join us! See our current job opportunities here.