Sr. Director of Engineering - Graph Data Plane

Whether you binge-watch a series on Netflix plan faraway vacations from your phone or read international news online you’ve likely used Apollo’s technology this week. Apollo supports some of the largest GraphQL platforms in the world.

We’re not looking to rest on our laurels though — we’re aiming to change how software is built. Apollo wants to empower every software team to build an amazing user experience across any number of clients without dealing with a barrage of API endpoints. Are you with us?

ABOUT THE TEAM AND THE ROLE

Today GraphQL is rapidly emerging as the next generation API technology of choice to unify data access across a wide range of data sources and deliver business value. Apollo’s GraphOS platform helps API platform developers around the world build and operate their data access layers at scale. It is used in production by some of today's largest and most innovative companies including Netflix Expedia Peloton DoorDash The New York Times Zillow and many more. GraphOS fundamentally democratizes data and accelerates business transformation. Our Graph Data Plane organization owns the critical tier of GraphOS - Core Router and Apollo Federation - the underlying engine powering GraphOS making it a highly performant secure governed and reliable self-service GraphQL platform. We are looking for an experienced engineering leader who can lead this critical pillar of Apollo’s engineering team to help deliver a delightful GraphOS platform for our users.

This is an opportunity to deeply partner with the Engineering leadership team to envision the strategy over the next 18-24 months design and deliver against our roadmap and hone the craft of our Graph Data Plane engineering team through user impact and results.

WHO YOU ARE

You care deeply about people. You’re fundamentally excited to be a part of building the infrastructure of the future. You have an insatiable curiosity humility and drive to hone your craft. You lead with a growth mindset – the work is never done and there’s something to learn from everyone.  You embody our leadership principles in all that you do: creating clarity unlocking performance and delivering results. We highly encourage you to apply if you meet the minimum requirements.

What you’ll do

• [Business] Lead key business KPIs to deliver results which align business goals to the organization’s technical strategy roadmap and objectives.

• [X-org] Collaborate with and influence executive leadership and cross-functional stakeholders: product management customer success & go-to-market to deliver cross-cutting strategic product and infrastructure projects.

• [Run The Business] Drive strategic and tactical prioritization of engineering investments to refine our systems architecture in ways that unlock next generation solutions for our user’s needs.

• [Execution] Manage and grow a team of engineers and engineering leaders including line managers to deliver high business impact projects on schedule with high-quality.

• [Hiring] Partner with our Talent Acquisition team to attract and hire top talent and define the overall hiring strategies for your team.

• [People & development] Build and lead high performing collaborative teams empowering leaders through trust autonomy and psychological safety and accelerating individual career development.

• [Community] Understand free and open licensed projects deeply to help drive the right balance between our users’ needs and the community interests.

• Participate in on-call rotation.

Minimum requirements

• 3+ years as a Sr. Director or above (leading directors managers senior managers and Principal level IC's).

• Experience leading and scaling teams of at least 25 people.

• Minimum 3 years of deep technical experience managing teams that have shipped and operated critical distributed systems infrastructure at scale.

• Experience managing engineering teams working on API design platforms (e.g. building internal or external developer products) or frameworks.

• Skilled at both receiving feedback and delivering feedback that moves the dial.

• Creates alignment clarity and connection through adaptive and persuasive written and verbal communication skills; able to apply technical judgment to drive clarity with Sr. Staff and Principal engineers about architecture and technical strategic decisions.

• Understanding of different SDLC models and their relevance to source-available products including optimizing for backwards compatibility community reception and software licensing.

• Experience driving business and product success in a highly cross-functional environment with a high level of autonomy and responsibility.

• Experience successfully building a team (recruiting mentoring and retaining) defining its mission and executing on its goals.

Nice to have

• Experience leading large organizational and cultural change initiatives.

• Experience leading a remote and globally distributed team.

• Experience with a variety of common backend services and infrastructure platforms (GraphQL databases logging event streams metrics caching async programming models etc).

• Experience developing with and contributing to open source framework ecosystems.

• Experience developing sustainable in-house framework and abstraction ecosystems in large engineering orgs.

$270000 - $360000 a year

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 position can be done from anywhere in the US or Canada but will be working East/Central time zones in order to effectively support our EU teams.

Equal Opportunity: Apollo is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a talented and diverse workforce.

Privacy: California residents applying for positions at Apollo can see our privacy policy here .

E-Verify: Apollo is an E-Verify employer and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S. For more information please visit E-Verify .