Staff Software Engineer, Rust - Apollo GraphQL

About the Role

The GraphOS organization owns the critical tier of Apollo's platform — the underlying engine central to making GraphOS a highly performant, secure, governed, and reliable self-service GraphQL platform. As a key member of the GraphOS NA team, you'll be at the heart of this mission, owning the Router and enabling engineering teams to ship faster and deliver richer experiences than ever before.

What You'll Do

• Build, test, and maintain fault-tolerant infrastructure for GraphQL runtime platforms, primarily in idiomatic Rust, ensuring security, performance, and reliability.
• Triage, debug, and resolve escalations from enterprise customers running some of the largest GraphQL deployments in the world — hundreds of subgraphs processing trillions of requests per month.
• Operate and improve durable, stable public APIs used by demanding GraphQL workloads.
• Engage directly with users — whether community members or enterprise customers — to understand their needs, debug issues, and bring insights back to influence the platform's evolution.
• Design scalable, observable systems that integrate seamlessly into diverse customer infrastructure stacks, leveraging self-initiated research and real-world feedback.
• Collaborate with engineers across teams using supportive communication and constructive code reviews to deliver cohesive solutions.
• Mentor and guide teammates in architecting and writing idiomatic Rust code, while considering the end-to-end impact of changes and ensuring alignment with cross-domain concerns.
• Lead architectural discussions and cross-team initiatives, driving impactful changes as a technical leader or coaching others to step into leadership roles.
• Develop comprehensive technical designs and documentation that address cost efficiency, security, and observability.
• Participate in on-call rotations as a core part of the role, ensuring the reliability of mission-critical systems.

Minimum Requirements

• Experience with Rust and a passion for writing performant, maintainable code.
• Expertise in systems engineering, including stateless/fault-tolerant systems, event-driven patterns, and distributed paradigms.
• Strong debugging instincts and an energizing drive for hands-on operational work, not just feature development.
• Demonstrated cross-team collaboration skills with a positive, team-first mentality.
• Passion for GraphQL, modern developer tooling, and contributing to industry-leading innovations.
• A continuous growth mindset and drive to learn and stay current with industry trends.

Nice to Have

• Experience with GraphQL or large-scale runtime systems.
• Experience navigating high-escalation or high-incident environments.

About Apollo

Whether you binge-watch a series on Netflix, plan 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, empowering engineering teams to build exceptional user experiences without dealing with a barrage of API endpoints.