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.
• 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.

Minimum requirements

• Hands-on, production experience owning a search, ranking, relevance, or query-planning system at real scale — designing and iterating on the underlying logic.
• Experience trying multiple algorithmic approaches to a hard retrieval or ranking problem with concrete understanding of tradeoffs.
• Genuinely energized by ambiguity — preferring to define the right problem rather than execute a well-specified one.
• Clear communication skills and ability to thrive in a small, fast-moving team with minimal process overhead.
• Growth mindset and enthusiasm for the intersection of AI agents and enterprise infrastructure.

Nice to have

• Production experience with Rust.
• 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.
• Background in distributed query engines, federated query planning, or database query optimization.