Staff Software Engineer - AI Runtime

Are you excited by the challenge of building genuinely new infrastructure — where the problems aren't fully defined yet and the roadmap changes as fast as the field itself? Do you want to help figure out how AI agents discover, understand, and safely interact with real-world APIs? If so, we'd love to talk to you about joining Apollo's AI Systems team.

This team owns Constellation — Apollo's control plane for AI agents. Where GraphOS gives developers a unified way to query their data, Constellation gives AI agents a way to safely discover, understand, and coordinate across APIs at the enterprise level. This is genuinely early-stage R&D: we're piloting with select enterprise customers, iterating quickly, and figuring out the right architecture as we go rather than executing against a fixed multi-quarter plan.

What you'll do

• Design and build systems for API discovery, schema understanding, and safe agent-to-API orchestration at enterprise scale.

• Own search, ranking, relevance, or query-planning problems central to how agents find and use the right APIs and data — this is core to the role, not a peripheral concern.

• Prototype quickly, evaluate multiple algorithmic approaches, and iterate based on what you learn — priorities and direction can shift week to week as we learn from customer pilots.

• Build and evaluate agentic systems: tool-calling frameworks, agent orchestration, and the observability/evaluation tooling needed to trust what agents are doing.

• Collaborate closely with a small, high-context team where everyone influences architecture and direction — this is not a role with heavy process or deep management layers.

• Engage with select enterprise customers piloting Constellation to understand real usage patterns and bring that insight back into the system design.

• Communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to a small, technical leadership team and contribute to shaping the roadmap itself, not just executing against one.

Who you are — Minimum requirements

• You have hands-on, production experience owning a search, ranking, relevance, or query-planning system at real scale — not just integrating a third-party search tool, but designing and iterating on the underlying logic.

• You've tried multiple algorithmic approaches to a hard retrieval or ranking problem and can talk concretely about the tradeoffs.

• You're genuinely energized by ambiguity — you'd rather define the right problem than execute a well-specified one, and you're comfortable when priorities shift quickly.

• You communicate clearly and enjoy working in a small, fast-moving team with minimal process overhead.

• You have a growth mindset and want to be at the center of how AI agents and enterprise infrastructure intersect.

Nice to have

• Production experience with Rust — a strong plus, but not required.

• Experience building agent orchestration, tool-calling frameworks, or agent evaluation/observability systems (LLM-as-judge, tracing, etc.).

• Experience with RAG systems where you owned retrieval quality, not just integration.

• Background in distributed query engines, federated query planning, or database query optimization.

About Apollo

Whether you binge-watch a series on Netflix, plan faraway vacations from your phone, or read international news online, you've likely used Apollo's technology this week. Apollo supports some of the largest GraphQL platforms in the world.

We're not looking to rest on our laurels though — we're aiming to change how software is built. Having built the foundation that powers GraphQL at enterprise scale, we're now building the control plane for the next wave of software: AI agents that need to safely discover, understand, and act on real systems.

Apollo is intent on becoming the company where you can see your career grow through challenging work, collaborating with incredible teammates, and accomplishing the unattainable.

Compensation & Benefits: 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 US or Canada (Canada has a different compensation range).

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.