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 (think SRE meets Ops with a heavy focus on automation of everything) setting a consistent example for how we lead projects and how we maintain our documents, dashboards, and code bases. 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 Zillow 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 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 are an expert 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!

$167,000 - $212,000 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.