Principal Software Engineer, Apollo
$242.3-306.4k
+ Equity
API orchestration platform for AI agents, web, and mobile apps
Job no longer available
API orchestration platform for AI agents, web, and mobile apps
101-200 employees
Job no longer available
$242.3-306.4k
+ Equity
101-200 employees
Company mission
To help developers and engineering teams build better software faster with a declarative, graph-based approach to API orchestration, accelerating application development and delivering, better more cohesive experiences, and now extending that same approach to power AI agents and agentic applications.
Role
Who you are
- Experience designing, building, and operating high scale distributed systems
- Background in API design, platforms, or frameworks
- Strong product and customer mindset, with a track record of moving fast, iterating, and delivering meaningful impact
- Ability to make technical decisions with considerations for long-term impact
- Success in collaborating across teams and building solid technical strategy
- Sound judgment in balancing technical debt, innovation, and business priorities
- Effective communication skills with various audiences including executives, customers, and engineers
Desirable
- Demonstrated ability to mentor & elevate senior+ engineers, and shape the influence of technical leaders across the org
- Familiarity with GraphQL, Federation architecture or API gateway technologies
- Understanding of software development lifecycle models and their application to source-available products
What the job involves
- As a Principal Engineer at Apollo, you'll be a technical leader who helps shape our engineering culture, directly advising senior & exec leadership across products and systems that power GraphOS
- Your work will influence company-wide priorities, delivering technical innovations that translate directly into customer value and business impact
- Today, GraphQL is emerging as the next generation API orchestration technology unifying data access across various sources
- Our GraphOS platform helps API developers worldwide build and operate their data access layers at scale
- In this role, you’ll partner directly with Product and Engineering leadership to develop strategy, design solutions, and elevate our engineering teams through meaningful impact and results
- Create solutions that deliver direct impact for customers and drive business growth
- Contribute to company-level objectives related to GraphOS adoption and success
- Balance current technical requirements with long-term architectural vision
- Use data to evaluate effectiveness and drive continuous improvement
- Propose ideas that create business value through technical insight and vision in the GraphQL ecosystem
- Develop resilient, scalable systems and optimize existing components of GraphOS, including the Core Router and Apollo Federation
- Lead and participate in technical forums to elevate design and architecture practices across Apollo
- Apply your expertise of GraphQL or distributed systems architecture to solve complex, high-impact problems
- Create high-quality technical documents that exemplify excellence for the engineering organization
- Guide strategic architectural decisions that enable innovative, adaptable solutions to meet a broad range of customer needs
- Identify areas of opportunity for the engineering and product organizations along with catalyzing the initial effort
- Ensure operational excellence and resilience across GraphOS systems in support of company-wide goals
- Develop technical plans and documentation that enable teams to deliver on Apollo's roadmap
- Combine high-level technical planning with hands-on problem-solving
- Collaborate with engineering management to build GraphOS components that are maintainable, performant, and secure
- Transform complex concepts into achievable deliverables that address customer needs
- Balance customer needs with community interests in open source projects
- Participate in an on-call rotation as necessary
- Serve as a key technical partner to stakeholders, including product and customer success, aligning engineering efforts with user and business priorities
- Drive alignment across functions by clearly communicating technical context, tradeoffs, and priorities
- Represent Apollo through various channels including customer conversations and community engagement
- Engage with thought leaders in the GraphQL and API platform ecosystem
- Support the growth of the team by helping to identify, interview, and recruit top engineering talent
Our take
Apollo provides technology to help startups and enterprises build apps using GraphQL. It provides the data graph layer connecting modern apps to the cloud, and is the industry standard implementation for GraphQL.
Apollo claims that GraphQL wins out over competing REST APIs by offering a slicker, more bug-resistant service that does not require complex data fetching code. Certainly, the benefits of GraphQL become apparent with more complex web services or mobile applications, and this is the direction in which companies are increasingly headed as business shifts online. As such, it is unsurprising that Apollo count PayPal, New York Times, and Walmart among a roster of high-profile clients.
In recent years, Apollo has shifted online and its products are in high demand. Due to this, the company has both the resources and the strong industry reputation to continue offering it at the highest grade. Its 2022 launch of "Supergraph", a software layer designed to unify disparate data feeds and create one source for front-end developers, is a good demonstration of the company's continued dedication to innovating.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
126% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Aug 2021
$130m
SERIES D
Jun 2019
$22m
SERIES C
Total funding: $183.4m
Company benefits
- Globally distributed company: No return-to-office for us. We believe in the strengths that come with being a globally distributed company. Our 220+ Apollonauts located in 10 countries and 13 time zones thrive on working from home, learning from each other, and avoiding long commutes and traffic jams (although that hike to the kitchen for snacks between meetings can be a real journey).
- Flexible Time Off (FTO): Whether it’s planning a vacation or taking some time to focus on your well-being, one thing matters to us: you have time to focus on you. Rest up, and make sure you share those travel pics when you get back. *For our UK and Canada teammates, we also offer "flexible time off in practice" which folds in your country-specific nuances so you may share the benefits of taking vacation that is restful, rejuvenating, and individualized for your needs.
- Full benefits package: We provide a variety of meaningful and competitive benefits based on whether you’re located in UK, Canada, or USA. When you go through the recruitment process, we’ll walk you through your country-specific package. No matter what life throws at you, rest assured that you and your family will be covered.
- Parental leave: Welcoming a new child is going to change your world, and we want to be here to support you when you need it. We offer leave for birthing and non-birthing parents, and a personal leave specialist to guide you through the process.
- Streamlined collaboration: Virtual “coffee chats”, tools that help us work as a distributed company, and a culture of documentation and global inclusivity ensure we stay connected and collaborate throughout the week.
- Company Kickoff: We believe in building meaningful connections with each and every Apollonaut. Once a year, we get the whole team together for our annual Company Kickoff where we learn, align, and most importantly, build relationships with each other. We can’t wait to see you at the next one!
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Matt DeBergalis
(Co-Founder & CEO)Founder of ActBlue and Meteor Development group. Former Engineer at NetApp. MSc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
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