Senior Software Engineer - Orchestration Language Team

Apollo GraphQL

3d • $165,000 - $195,000

About The Position

The Orchestration Language team owns Apollo's MCP Server, MCP Apps, and GraphOS MCP Server/Tools. These components let AI agents discover, query, and act on federated graphs through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). As AI agents become a key consumer of GraphQL APIs, this is becoming one of the most strategically important surfaces in the platform. We're hiring an additional engineer to work across MCP Server, MCP Apps, GraphOS MCP Tools, and the broader Skills ecosystem. This is a build-and-define role: MCP tooling for GraphQL is still young, and this engineer will help shape how agents interact with federated graphs ensuring MCP spec compatibility, designing tools, improving introspection and execution reliability, and building the Skills that make agent workflows useful in production. For someone with a strong interest in Federation, there's room to work across the boundary, contributing to composition and query planning where MCP/Skills work intersects with core Federation. The ideal candidate is a strong systems engineer with product instincts — someone who's energized by defining a new interface layer, but who also brings the rigor to keep it running: operational maintenance, bug fixes, and codebase health work are a real part of this role, not just occasional cleanup. We're looking for someone who moves fluidly between "what should this do" and "make this reliable."

Requirements

• You have experience with Rust and enjoy writing performant, maintainable code (candidates with a strong low-level systems background in C/C++ who are ramping into Rust will also be considered).
• You have expertise in systems engineering — stateless/fault-tolerant systems, event-driven patterns, distributed paradigms, and/or protocol implementation.
• You're an active, hands-on user of AI developer tools and can speak concretely to how you use them, where they fall short, and what "good" looks like — this is a strong signal for this role, even without direct MCP experience.
• You have strong debugging instincts and are energized by hands-on operational work, not just feature development.
• You excel at cross-team collaboration and bring a "rising tide lifts all boats" mentality.
• You have a growth mindset and actively seek to learn and stay current with industry trends, especially in the fast-moving AI/agent space.

Nice To Haves

• Direct experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) — e.g., you've implemented an MCP server, read the spec draft, or built tools/integrations against it.
• Experience building or maintaining "Skills" or similar packaged capabilities for AI agent workflows.
• Experience with GraphQL or large-scale runtime systems.
• Experience navigating high-escalation or high-incident environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain Apollo MCP Server and GraphOS MCP Server/Tools in idiomatic Rust, keeping pace with an actively evolving MCP specification (including upcoming breaking changes).
• Ship customer-driven improvements quickly — this team currently releases new MCP capabilities on a near-weekly basis in direct response to customer needs.
• Design and build "Skills" that make agent workflows useful in production, and help package/distribute them across Apollo's product surfaces.
• Improve tool discovery and introspection so AI agents can more reliably find and use the right GraphQL capabilities (e.g., tool search, partitioning tool sets, reducing context size for agents).
• Expand GraphOS platform capabilities (schema checks, composition, health data, etc.) as MCP tools for AI agents.
• Engage directly with customers and the community to understand needs, debug issues, and bring insights back to influence the roadmap.
• Collaborate with engineers across Federation, Connectors, and Client teams as MCP/Skills work intersects with core GraphQL Federation.
• Own projects end-to-end — from design doc through delivery — and contribute to codebase health, bug fixes, and operational reliability, not just new feature work.
• Participate in a lightweight on-call rotation (this team's on-call load is notably light).

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed