Staff Software Engineer - Foundation

Are you a talented and driven distributed systems engineer with a proven track record capable of leading cross-organizational features? Does tech debt quiver in its boots at the sound of your name? Do you butter your bread with evented systems? Have the letters C Q R and S been ruined for you in an eventually consistent manner? Have we got news for you: you’re not alone!

In this high-impact role you’ll be a leader on our Platform Engineering team. You'll help foster our best Platform Engineers setting a consistent example for how we lead projects and how we maintain our documents dashboards and code bases. Your key focus will be in how we aid our developer velocity at Apollo through the internal developer platform. Our team’s current focus is on Service Delivery (Kubernetes) Infrastructure Management (Terraform) CI/CD (Argo Atlantis) and in general all things SLOs and Operational Excellence. Your teammates are talented folks who value code that is 80% of the value for 20% of the work designs that are forward-thinking enough to be easily flexible for the next features and leadership with a healthy dose of mindfulness and humility.

Apollo is the worldwide leader of GraphQL innovation. Companies like Netflix Walmart Expedia Peloton DoorDash The New York Times and PayPal are just a small sample of Apollo's customers. Our open-source product has millions of downloads every week. According to the new Gartner report by 2027 more than 60% of enterprises will use GraphQL in production (up from less than 30% in 2024) and 30% of those enterprises will be using GraphQL federation which Apollo pioneered.

GraphQL is transforming the software development space by creating a brand new layer in companies' stacks called the supergraph that helps engineering teams ship faster and build richer experiences than ever before. Join us and build the future of Apollo’s internal Developer Platform!

What You'll Do:

• You’ll become a key Domain owner for the team taking responsibility for our cloud infrastructure in partnership with our Platform Security team and especially for our Service Delivery Platform (namely K8s).

• You will lead cross-team groups of developers and shepherd large-impact initiatives along either as the technical leader or coaching members of the team to become technical leaders.

• You’ll mentor junior members of the team and help with interviewing potential teammates.

• You’ll create technical designs that proactively address cost efficiency security and observability.

• You’ll deliver technical plans one-pagers DRs and other artifacts.

• You’ll work with Kotlin Rust Node Kubernetes GCP Helm Terraform DataDog ArgoCD CircleCI Atlantis Docker (the list goes on) to deliver your work.

• You’ll be responsible for improving developer velocity across the company (leveraging frameworks like DORA) and hardening our reliability and observability.

• You'll participate in on-call rotation.

About You:

• You have proven systems expertise and experience with stateless/fault tolerant systems as well as working familiarity with eventing patterns and distributed paradigms.

• You are adept at weighing technical and business trade-offs and are exceptional at “seeing down the road and around corners.”

• You enjoy cross-team collaboration and believe in a “rising tides lifts all boats” mentality. You’re a joy to those around you bringing everyone along for the ride.

• You are data-oriented and leverage data to make decisions in a concrete way.

• You’re an expert in building developer platforms/portals and service chassis/frameworks

• Bonus points for Kotlin Rust or Node!

• You are adept with Kubernetes GCP (preferably but AWS or Azure is great too!) and Terraform.

• Bonus points for Helm Docker ArgoCD CircleCI DataDog and of course GraphQL!

$167000 - $212000 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 is a remote position that can be done from anywhere in the United States or Canada.

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.