Staff Software Engineer (Platform Team)

📋 Description

• • Are you passionate about the future of AI and its safe integration into real-world production systems? Apollo GraphQL is at the forefront of this revolution, building the essential infrastructure that empowers organizations to connect AI agents to their APIs and data securely and at scale. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Platform Team, you will play a pivotal role in shaping this future, specifically within our groundbreaking Registry.
• • The Registry is not just a component; it's the foundational bedrock of Apollo's enterprise agent integration platform. It defines the blueprint for how tools, APIs, and services are registered, versioned, governed, discovered, and operated. Our mission is to transform disparate, one-off integrations into a single, coherent, and trusted platform that enables AI agents and gateways to operate with confidence and efficiency.
• • As a member of the Registry team, you will be part of the central nervous system of Apollo's Platform organization. You will be an architect and owner of the control plane, the lifecycle management systems, the core artifacts, and the customer-facing web applications that power both GraphOS, Apollo's enterprise-grade GraphQL platform used by hundreds of businesses, and Apollo's Next-Generation Agent Platform, which is designing the future of secure agent integration and management.
• • This role offers unparalleled gravity and opportunity for engineers driven by challenges that are both technically profound and strategically essential to the company's future. You will be instrumental in transforming the Registry into a powerful, enduring platform that defines how our users build and manage their applications.
• • Your responsibilities will extend far beyond a single service. You will drive innovation across the entire stack, from high-performance backend services and control-plane APIs to core artifact pipelines and intuitive customer-facing web applications. You will collaborate closely with Product, Design, and diverse engineering teams to deliver world-class solutions.
• • Key responsibilities include taking technical ownership of critical Registry domains such as schema and service lifecycle management, artifact pipelines, or complex registry workflows. You will serve as a technical lead on high-impact, cross-team initiatives, partnering with platform, security, runtime, and observability teams to ensure seamless integration and robust functionality.
• • You will be responsible for designing and building essential platform primitives, including APIs, data models, and workflows that both internal teams and external customers will rely on. This involves a deep understanding of distributed systems, consistency models, failure modes, and resiliency patterns.
• • A significant aspect of this role involves operating what you build. You will participate in on-call rotations, incident response, and postmortems, ensuring the reliability, observability, and long-term maintainability of our systems. Designing for safety, including robust rollback paths, smooth migrations, and incremental delivery, will be paramount.
• • Furthermore, you will be expected to raise the bar for the entire team. This includes mentoring other engineers, actively participating in design reviews, and contributing to architectural decisions that enhance the team's capabilities and the platform's overall quality.
• • We are looking for engineers who are adept at designing and operating distributed, multi-tenant backend systems in production. A strong understanding of consistency models, failure modes, resiliency patterns, and scalability trade-offs is crucial. Experience building platforms or control planes, including APIs, data models, and workflows that other teams depend on, is highly valued.
• • Proficiency in at least one modern backend language such as TypeScript/Node, Go, Rust, or Java is required, along with solid experience in datastores (relational plus key-value, document, or time-series) and data modeling. Hands-on experience owning services in production, including on-call duties, incident response, and postmortems, is essential.
• • A strong grasp of observability principles (metrics, tracing, logging), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and capacity/performance tuning is necessary. We seek individuals with a history of designing for "boring" production behavior, emphasizing safety, rollback paths, migrations, and incremental delivery.
• • The ability to drive system design for complex features that span multiple services and teams is critical. You should be comfortable working with infrastructure components like CI/CD, deployment, configuration, and runtime environments, and partnering effectively with frontend engineers to deliver end-to-end user experiences.
• • Experience working closely with Product and Design teams to define scope, prioritize efforts, and iterate on solutions is expected. Strong written and verbal communication skills, particularly for asynchronous collaboration and design reviews, are vital for success in this remote role.
• • Bonus points for familiarity with GraphQL, GraphOS-like platforms, or API gateways. Exposure to AI agents, tool/function calling, or agent orchestration platforms is a significant plus. Experience modeling tools/APIs for LLMs or building infrastructure for AI-powered systems, as well as experience with cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, containers, service meshes), will set you apart. Driving technical standards in areas like operability, security, testing, and code review norms is also highly desirable.
• • Join us and help build the future of AI integration with robust, scalable, and secure infrastructure.