Principal Software Engineer, Apollo

• 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

• 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