Staff Backend Engineer

Your Role & Mission

As a Staff Software Engineer at Apollo you’ll be responsible for leading the technical direction and execution of complex high-impact initiatives that span teams and systems. Your influence will extend beyond your immediate team—shaping architectural decisions elevating engineering practices and mentoring future leaders.

🔹 Responsibilities

• Architect and build scalable high-availability systems that run 24/7 and support mission-critical workflows

• Own and deliver multi-tier high-volume applications with performance accessibility and resilience in mind

• Write high-quality maintainable code with a strong focus on developer experience and system performance

• Drive and uphold engineering best practices including code reviews test coverage monitoring and observability

• Provide technical leadership across cross-functional teams guiding architecture trade-offs and execution

• Mentor and sponsor engineers to grow their impact and deepen engineering culture

• Lead large-scale cross-team projects from concept to production

• Deliver clear objective feedback to peers and junior engineers through structured reviews and 1:1s

🎯 Outcomes You’ll Drive

• Customer Impact – Deep understanding of product metrics and direct contribution to measurable improvements through agile iteration

• Technical Leadership – Lead complex projects own key systems and define roadmaps in collaboration with managers and PMs

• Velocity – Consistent output and high impact even within challenging legacy or high-complexity codebases

• Engineering Quality – Set the standard for code quality and technical excellence on your team

• Cross-Team Communication – Drive alignment across squads and stakeholders through effective communication

• Platform Resilience – Build scalable monitored and self-healing systems with best-in-class availability

🛠️ Requirements

• 10+ years of deep experience building and scaling backend systems in production environments

• Proven ability to develop features with performance reliability and scalability in mind

• Strong product intuition —balancing technical scope with MVP delivery

• Expertise with message queues background jobs and distributed system patterns

• Familiarity with observability tools (e.g. GCP Logging Prometheus NewRelic)

• Demonstrated ability to leverage AI tools (e.g. code generation debugging automation) and stay current with emerging AI trends

• Experience with LLM architecture pipelines or applied AI tooling is a strong bonus

🌟 Nice to Have

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field (or equivalent experience)

• Proficiency in one or more general-purpose programming languages (e.g. Java Python Ruby Go)

• Experience integrating with third-party APIs including handling rate limits failure cases and retries gracefully

💡 Example Problems you’ll work-on:

• Scaling Workflows Platform – Help us turn Workflows into a plug-and-play automation platform where new triggers actions and integrations can be added in hours not weeks.

• Fault-Tolerant Infrastructure – Design the backbone of a high-scale event-driven system that guarantees reliability speed and safety at massive scale.

• Agentic Automation & Adoption – Lead the roadmap for next-gen agentic automation and build tooling that empowers every team at Apollo to move faster with confidence.

If you're looking for a place where your backend engineering work directly impacts millions of users where you can push the boundaries of what's possible with LLMs and agents and where your career can thrive in the AI-native future—Apollo is the place for you.

Application Instructions

To help us identify candidates with strong real-world AI engineering experience please answer the following five short screening questions directly in your application (2–5 sentences per response). Applications without answers to these questions will not be reviewed.