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Apollo GraphQL is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join the AI Systems team and help build Constellation, Apollo's control plane for AI agents. This is early-stage R&D work where you'll design and build systems for API discovery, schema understanding, and safe agent-to-API orchestration at enterprise scale.
You'll own search, ranking, relevance, and query-planning problems central to how AI agents discover and safely use the right APIs and data. The role involves prototyping quickly, evaluating multiple algorithmic approaches, and iterating based on customer pilot feedback. You'll build and evaluate agentic systems including tool-calling frameworks, agent orchestration, and observability/evaluation tooling to ensure agents operate safely and predictably.
You'll work closely with a small, high-context team where everyone influences architecture and direction with minimal process overhead. You'll engage directly with select enterprise customers piloting Constellation to understand real usage patterns and bring those insights into system design. You'll communicate technical tradeoffs to leadership and contribute to shaping the roadmap itself, not just executing against a predetermined plan.
Minimum qualifications include hands-on production experience owning a search, ranking, relevance, or query-planning system at real scale—not just integrating third-party tools but designing and iterating on underlying logic. You should have tried multiple algorithmic approaches to hard retrieval or ranking problems and can discuss concrete tradeoffs. You're energized by ambiguity, prefer defining the right problem over executing well-specified ones, and are comfortable with rapidly shifting priorities. Strong communication skills and a growth mindset are essential.
Nice-to-have qualifications include production Rust experience, background building agent orchestration or tool-calling frameworks, experience with RAG systems where you owned retrieval quality, and knowledge of distributed query engines, federated query planning, or database query optimization.
Apollo powers GraphQL at enterprise scale for companies like Netflix and is now building infrastructure for the next wave of software: AI agents that safely discover, understand, and act on real systems.
