Staff Backend Engineer

🌟 As a Staff Software Engineer at Apollo, you’ll be responsible for leading the technical direction and execution of complex, high-impact initiatives that span teams and systems. Your influence will extend beyond your immediate team—shaping architectural decisions, elevating engineering practices, and mentoring future leaders.

🔹 Responsibilities

• Architect and build scalable, high-availability systems that run 24/7 and support mission-critical workflows

• Own and deliver multi-tier, high-volume applications with performance, accessibility, and resilience in mind

• Write high-quality, maintainable code with a strong focus on developer experience and system performance

• Drive and uphold engineering best practices, including code reviews, test coverage, monitoring, and observability

• Provide technical leadership across cross-functional teams, guiding architecture, trade-offs, and execution

• Mentor and sponsor engineers to grow their impact and deepen engineering culture

• Lead large-scale, cross-team projects from concept to production

• Deliver clear, objective feedback to peers and junior engineers through structured reviews and 1:1s

🎯 Outcomes You’ll Drive

• Customer Impact – Deep understanding of product metrics and direct contribution to measurable improvements through agile iteration

• Technical Leadership – Lead complex projects, own key systems, and define roadmaps in collaboration with managers and PMs

• Velocity – Consistent output and high impact, even within challenging, legacy, or high-complexity codebases

• Engineering Quality – Set the standard for code quality and technical excellence on your team

• Cross-Team Communication – Drive alignment across squads and stakeholders through effective communication

• Platform Resilience – Build scalable, monitored, and self-healing systems with best-in-class availability

🛠️ Requirements

• 10+ years of deep experience building and scaling backend systems in production environments

• Proven ability to develop features with performance, reliability, and scalability in mind

• Strong product intuition—balancing technical scope with MVP delivery

• Expertise with message queues, background jobs, and distributed system patterns

• Familiarity with observability tools (e.g., GCP Logging, Prometheus, NewRelic)

• Demonstrated ability to leverage AI tools (e.g., code generation, debugging, automation) and stay current with emerging AI trends

• Experience with LLM architecture, pipelines, or applied AI tooling is a strong bonus

🌟 Nice to Have

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field (or equivalent experience)

• Proficiency in one or more general-purpose programming languages (e.g., Java, Python, Ruby, Go)

• Experience integrating with third-party APIs, including handling rate limits, failure cases, and retries gracefully

💡 Example Challenges You’ll Tackle

• Scaling Workflows Platform – Help us turn Workflows into a plug-and-play automation platform where new triggers, actions, and integrations can be added in hours, not weeks.

• Fault-Tolerant Infrastructure – Design the backbone of a high-scale, event-driven system that guarantees reliability, speed, and safety at massive scale.

• Agentic Automation & Adoption – Lead the roadmap for next-gen agentic automation and build tooling that empowers every team at Apollo to move faster with confidence.