Staff Software Engineer (Platform Team)

Apollo GraphQL

$120K — $160K *
US-AnywhereRemote in United States
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in software engineering, especially with distributed systems and server architecture.
  • Proficiency in Rust programming language for backend development.
  • Strong expertise in agent orchestration, routing, and coordination in scalable systems.
  • Experience in protocol design and server-side orchestration frameworks.
  • Hands-on experience with observability, monitoring, and debugging of complex systems.
  • Technical leadership skills, including mentoring junior engineers.
  • Proven record of incident response and performance optimization in backend systems.

Responsibilities

  • Architect and scale the MCP Server and Gateway to support enterprise-grade AI workflows.
  • Design and implement reliable and performant server infrastructure.
  • Build tools for agent communication and coordination.
  • Define optimizations and deployment strategies to enhance efficiency.
  • Develop frameworks for multi-agent collaboration and AI-driven workflows.
  • Integrate observability and monitoring solutions into servers and agents.
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to meet product and developer needs.

Benefits

  • Choice of multiple medical plans from Anthem Blue Cross or Kaiser for California residents.
  • Dental and vision benefits offered by Sun Life Financial.
  • Remote work flexibility in the U.S. and Canada.
  • Equity options provided in addition to salary.
Full Job Description
If you're excited by the idea of AI agents operating safely in real production systems, this role sits right at the center of that future.

Apollo is pioneering the enterprise agent integration space with a complete platform: the agent gateway, registry, observability, and orchestration layer. This is the critical infrastructure that empowers organizations to connect AI agents to their APIs and data safely, at scale. It's Apollo's boldest move into the agentic middleware arena.

The Registry team doesn't just build a component; we forge the bedrock. We define the blueprint for how tools, APIs, and services are registered, versioned, governed, discovered, and operated, transforming disparate one-off integrations into a single, coherent, and trusted platform for agents and gateways to thrive.

What You'll Do

Join us as a software engineer and become a key architect of the Registry, transforming it into a powerful, enduring platform that defines the future of how our users build and manage their applications.

This is a high-impact, cross-functional role that goes far beyond a single service. You'll drive innovation across the entire stack from high-performance backend services and control-plane APIs to core artifact pipelines and the intuitive customer-facing web applications. You will collaborate closely with Product, Design, and diverse engineering teams to deliver world-class solutions.
  • Own critical Registry domains: Take technical ownership of core systems such as schema and service lifecycle, artifact pipelines, or registry workflows.
  • Lead high-impact initiatives: Serve as technical lead on cross-team efforts involving platform, security, runtime, and observability partners.
  • Design platform primitives: Build APIs, data models, and workflows that internal teams and customers depend on.
  • Operate what you build: Participate in on-call, incident response, and postmortems. Design for reliability, observability, and long-term maintainability.
  • Raise the bar around you: Mentor other engineers, review designs, and help the team make better architectural decisions over time.
What We're Looking For
  • Proven experience designing and operating distributed, multi-tenant backend systems in production
  • Strong understanding of consistency models, failure modes, resiliency patterns, and scalability tradeoffs
  • Experience building platforms / control planes: APIs, data models, and workflows that other teams build on
  • Strong proficiency in at least one modern backend language (e.g., TypeScript/Node, Go, Rust, Java, or similar)
  • Solid experience with datastores (relational + one of: key-value, document, or time-series) and data modeling
  • Hands-on experience owning services in production: on-call, incident response, postmortems
  • Strong grasp of observability (metrics, tracing, logging), SLOs, and capacity/performance tuning
  • History of designing for "boring" production behavior: safety, rollback paths, migrations, incremental delivery
  • Ability to drive system design for complex features spanning multiple services and teams
  • Comfortable working with infrastructure (CI/CD, deployment, config, runtime) and partnering with frontend engineers to deliver end-to-end experiences
  • Experience working closely with Product and Design to define scope, prioritize, and iterate
  • Strong written and verbal communication, especially for async collaboration and design reviews

Bonus
  • Familiarity with GraphQL, GraphOS-like platforms, or API gateways
  • Exposure to AI agents, tool / function calling, or agent orchestration platforms
  • Experience modeling tools/APIs for LLMs or building infrastructure for AI-powered systems
  • Experience with cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, containers, service meshes)
  • Experience driving technical standards (operability, security, testing, code review norms)


At Apollo, we strive to provide competitive, market-informed compensation whilst ensuring consistency within the team in each country. We make hiring decisions based on your skills, experience, and our overall assessment of what we learned during the hiring process. In addition to the U.S. base salary range, we also provide equity and benefits.

Apollo offers all U.S. employees a choice of 3 Anthem Blue Cross medical plans and California residents can also choose from an additional 2 Kaiser medical plans. Dental and Vision benefits are provided by Sun Life Financial.

Location: This is a remote position that can be done from anywhere in the United States or Canada. The posted compensation is for the US location.

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