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Working on Things that Matter at Tysons-Headquartered Appian

Founded 25 years ago by four roommates in a Fairfax County apartment, Tysons-based Appian has grown to be a global company. Appian is a leading software company that automates business processes for some of the most innovative businesses and government agencies across the world.

Located in a state-of-the-art glass office tower in Tysons, Appian offers an engaging and collaborative work environment, with a full-size gym, onsite daycare, food establishments, a dry cleaner, and more. With over 2,000 employees, Appian is hiring for nearly 100 jobs, as of this posting, with opportunities in its Engineering, Client Success, Sales, Marketing and Corporate divisions. Thinking of moving to Northern Virginia? Appian even offers relocation packages to some of its new hires.

Appian’s Chief People Officer Susan Charnaux sat down with the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority to tell us about the company, what it is like to work there, why it’s great to be headquartered in Fairfax County, and how employees work on “things that matter” at Appian.

FCEDA: What’s your role at Appian?

Susan Charnaux: As the Chief People Officer, my role is to help guide Appian’s talent. Specifically, our team’s goals are to help find the best talent, bring them to Appian, and then help make Appian the best place for employees to work.

FCEDA: Can you give me a brief history of the founding and growth of your company?

Susan Charnaux: Appian was founded 25 years ago, by our four co-founders, Matt Calkins, Michael Beckley, Marc Wilson, and Robert C Kramer. They were roommates in an apartment near here when they founded the company. They came up with the idea that they wanted to start a business that would be different and would help other companies operate more efficiently. They worked hard together as a team to pull it off. It was bootstrapped all the way along. It’s an unusual story for tech companies in this market to have been able to do that, without a lot of reliance on outside investors. It did not start off as a software company, but over time, they saw the need and the opportunity to introduce software to help further the original goal of making things work more efficiently for their customers. And that continues to be the case, in helping solve the hardest problems for customers.

FCEDA: How many employees do you have?

Susan Charnaux: We have over 2,000 employees. The majority are in the U.S., with over 800 here at headquarters in Tysons. We have 3 offices in the United States and 9 offices overseas. We have large offices in London, with about 200 employees, and in India and Australia, both with more than 100 employees.

FCEDA: What makes this a great place to work?

Susan Charnaux: Several things come to mind, and what we often hear from our employees is they feel really cared for. As employees here, they have opportunities to grow, and they know that they are contributing to creating a great product and service for customers that they feel proud to create and deliver.

And in tech, things move fast, and things change all the time. That’s part of the story of Appian as being willing to change and get things done differently. It is about strong connections and staff training and then the ability to work on things that really matter. And they matter to our customers. We do all kinds of high-stakes work.

Locally, many of our customers are federal government clients with very important projects. It may involve anything from national security to healthcare to social services. But Appian figures it out. We’re currently working with Axiom Space in Florida. They are making spacesuits for the next space mission missions in the International Space Station. Axiom now uses Appian to make that possible, even though it is a very advanced technology company in and of itself. We work with automakers like Jaguar and Land Rover, a lot of big banks, and insurance companies. So, Appian works with very high trust situations that matter. And I think that’s important to employees, to know that they’ve contributed to something that truly is important. 

FCEDA: Can you talk a little about how Appian is attracting and retaining talent in the competitive Greater D.C. technology landscape?

Susan Charnaux: Greater Washington is a very competitive marketplace, for sure. Especially in Fairfax County, it stands out because we have a lot of competitors, including right here in Tysons, who are looking also for the same kind of talent. So how do we compete? We seek to set ourselves apart as a different kind of business because we’re not big tech but are definitely not a small startup anymore. So, we try to provide that sweet spot for employees who want to come in and grow their careers. Here, they have opportunities to perhaps start in a technical career path, but then also grow and try other types of job opportunities.

We generally have a strategy of seeking people out early in their careers. We do quite a lot of recruiting from Virginia universities. Virginia Tech, University of Virginia, and George Mason University are three of our biggest sources of talent. Many of the candidates potentially grew up in the Northern Virginia area and want to come home. And University of Maryland is another huge source of talent for us, and we encourage them to come to Northern Virginia. So, our strategy is finding local talent and then people who want to be in the area for the beginning of their career. It is a great place to start a technical career path because we offer lots of training in the very beginning so that they can learn how to be successful.

The other thing is that we also give back to the community. So, for many years we’ve run a board game league in Fairfax County Public Schools, which is a fun thing. We bring the students into Appian for a board game tournament. Board gaming is one of our founder Matt Calkins’ passions. He designs board games and competes at the world championships. I have a team member who helps coordinate with teachers and staff in the schools that run that program within the county. We coordinate and help with programming and supplies for the kids.

We also partner with D.C. public schools and send volunteers there. We work with one class that we’ve supported throughout their education. And we’ve hosted a career fair, bringing other partners, so that the students can meet and learn about technology career opportunities.

FCEDA: Tell us more about why Fairfax County is a great place for accessing talent.

Susan Charnaux: Fairfax County is a great place to access talent. We’ve been very intentional about keeping our home base here and making sure that this location continues to grow even as we’ve become a much more international and global company. This is certainly Appian’s home base because we know we can find great talent, and people who want to live here. It’s a nice place to live so we’re even finding that increasingly people want to move from California, and other parts of the country to Northern Virginia. Maybe they had an early education experience here, or they have family here, or some other reason to be here. I have a current team member who’s moving from New Jersey and is going to be relocating his family here. 

Also, the Tysons area itself has developed a lot. There are quite a few resources to attract employees to be here. We have access to the Metro and a shuttle service that goes from there to the office. It is a short walk for those who prefer the exercise.

We have a beautiful office complex here, which includes a huge gym, food service, dry cleaning, and onsite childcare. Some employees take advantage of sending their children to a school next door, which is convenient. And some people enjoy just living right nearby in Tysons. And increasingly, people can walk around Tysons. I grew up in Northern Virginia, and that wasn’t always the case.

Hence, Tysons is easily accessible, even for those who don’t live in Fairfax County. We have employees who live in Falls Church, Arlington, Loudoun County, and so forth. And so, this location that’s right directly off the Toll Road and the Beltway is accessible for them.

FCEDA: Are there opportunities for growth, cross-functionality and retraining within the company?

Susan Charnaux: Yes, at Appian we have a tradition of talent moving internally a lot. Over the past several years, our CEO and I have been collaborating on a concept called “talent flow,” meaning that we want to be more intentional in letting people find new opportunities within the company. In other words, how someone can find a new role inside the company, for example, changing from being a software engineer to becoming a consultant to becoming a salesperson. We have had many examples of that.

So, we try to publish internal roles first for all our employees. We encourage them to reach out. We train the managers to help their employees spot those opportunities and feel comfortable applying for them. And then we offer lots of training. All our training is accessible to employees who want to do it. For example, I just had an Australian-based recruiter on my team who wanted to do our technical training. It is an intensive training that is mostly done by software engineers. But she said that she really wanted to do it. She had a PhD in foreign languages, not computer languages, so it was definitely a different thing. But we agreed to find the right time in our schedules when the workload was not too much for her to be able to do that. We made it possible for her to take the three weeks to do the extra training. We are waiting on the results of it, and perhaps she’ll start a more technical career path.

FCEDA: Tell us about Appian’s training programs in general when someone first starts here.

Susan Charnaux: We have a series of training programs for new employees. It’s a big investment on our part, but we think it helps a lot for someone to feel secure and successful when they come to the job. It starts with orientation here at our headquarters office, or sometimes it’s in a different location. But for everyone joining here at the headquarters, they get to be in the space and glass-filled rooms, which are full of light upstairs. It is a lovely space. We train in person. We think that’s important. And then after that, the next phase of the training depends on their role and career path.

The more technical roles, including engineering, sales engineers and technical consultants, all attend what we call Appian Academy, a three-week intensive coding program that we offer with some expert trainers, who are all in-house. They need to know the technical side of it before they start working with customers. Appian Academy is the introduction to it, a combination of coursework and a project that they work on, usually with peers. They work on that project and then get to present it at the end of the course. It’s incredible to see what the students present. They have been able to build their own application in Appian, very much like our customers would. After that, they take a specific sales training program, depending on their job function. 

FCEDA: Tell us about Appian’s internship programs.

Susan Charnaux: We have an extensive intern program. We had 50 interns who were with Appian this summer at the Tysons headquarters. We had three interns who started in an inaugural intern program in India in our office there this year as well.

It is a longstanding program at Appian that starts early in the college as a recruiting tool process. Students in their junior year can apply for an internship spot. We work closely with the leaders here to figure out where an intern would have the best summer experience and the opportunity to learn and grow. It’s a real internship opportunity in terms of career preparation and most of the time it leads to an offer to come back full time and join the company.

It’s competitive, it’s paid, and there’s training. We find interns through the campus programs, working with the career services offices at our key schools, mostly Virginia schools. And Dartmouth, for example, has been a long-standing partner because several of our founders attended Dartmouth.

The new intern cohort started in the middle of June. We provide training to their managers, many of whom are former interns themselves, which is fun. The managers help them get onboarded, and then we cultivate a series of events throughout the summer so that they also have a fun experience in the D.C. area. Typically, they attend a baseball game or a board game night at our CEO’s house. It gets them exposure to activities around the area. We also work closely with a group in engineering who have a passion for people and cultivating the next generation. They volunteer to help with the programming and to help make sure the whole intern program runs smoothly. 

FCEDA: Do you offer relocation packages?

Susan Charnaux: We offer relocation to the D.C. area. We always offer it to candidates who are our university hires who are moving to this area for the first time. We also offer it for experienced, higher-level mid-career professionals. If they don’t live here, then we offer it for them to move here, in most cases. The amount varies depending on the level and role.

We offered relocation expenses to employees who we hired during COVID-19 who did not live here. After the pandemic, we realized that it would be much better to have them working here onsite.

FCEDA: Tell us about your initiative to hire veterans.

Susan Charnaux: Appian is committed to hiring veterans and transitioning military members. The AppianVeterans affinity group at Appian aims to help others have a better experience transitioning from military service to a corporate environment. Appian partners closely with the AppianVeterans affinity group to strengthen hiring among Veterans. Among many accomplishments, AppianVeterans recently advocated for Appian to update our employee handbook to include language about military leave. AppianVeterans collaborates on hiring programs with organizations such as Wounded Warrior Project, SkillStorm, and others. Appian partners with Wounded Warrior Project for events to help educate others on barriers veterans may face. SkillStorm is an authorized Appian Education partner that deploys specialized teams of custom-trained U.S. tech talent to its commercial and federal services clients. To learn more about Veterans hiring at Appian, visit our website.

FCEDA: Appian celebrated its 25th anniversary in August. What does this milestone mean to Appian?

Susan Charnaux: It’s amazing…25 years! That is a testament that the founders are still all
participating in meaningful roles at Appian. We’ve grown from four founders starting Appian in their apartment to a global company with many partners, some of whom are also based here. We are looking forward to continued success and the growth of Appian for many years to come.

Find out more about working at Appian at https://careers.appian.com/.