Senior Platform Engineer

Are you a talented and driven distributed systems engineer, with a proven track record, capable of leading cross-organizational features? Does tech debt quiver in its boots at the sound of your name? Do you butter your bread with evented systems? Have the letters C, Q, R, and S been ruined for you in an eventually consistent manner? Have we got news for you: you’re not alone! In this role, you’ll be a key contributor to our Platform Engineering team. You'll get the chance to hone your skills alongside some of the best Platform Engineers (think SRE meets Ops with a heavy focus on automation of everything). Our team’s current focus is on Service Delivery (Kubernetes), Infrastructure Management (Terraform), CI/CD (Argo, Atlantis), and in general all things SLOs and Operational Excellence. Your teammates are talented folks who value code that is 80% of the value for 20% of the work, designs that are forward-thinking enough to be easily flexible for the next features, and leadership with a healthy dose of mindfulness and humility. What you'll do - You’ll become a key contributor to the team, taking responsibility for the success of some of our subsystems.

• You will be participating on medium to large impact team initiatives, and within a year be able to execute on such projects.
• You’ll help with interviewing potential teammates.
• You’ll create technical designs that proactively address cost efficiency, security, and observability.
• You’ll deliver technical plans, one-pagers, DRs, and other artifacts.
• You’ll work with Kubernetes, GCP, Helm, Terraform, DataDog, ArgoCD, CircleCI, Atlantis, Docker (the list goes on) to deliver your work.
• You’ll be responsible for improving developer velocity across the company (leveraging frameworks like DORA) and hardening our reliability and observability.
• You’ll participate in on-call rotations and help keep all of Apollo afloat - You’ll be fully empowered to fix the root cause of issues, and ruthlessly quell any noisy monitors Who you are — Minimum requirements - You have systems expertise and experience with stateless/fault tolerant systems, as well as familiarity with eventing patterns and distributed paradigms.
• You’ve leveraged agentic tooling to not only enhance your day to day work, but detect and mitigate issues in production - You think about weighing technical and business trade-offs and are working at “seeing down the road and around corners.” - You enjoy cross-team collaboration and believe in a “rising tides lifts all boats” mentality.

You’re a joy to those around you, bringing everyone along for the ride.

• You are data-oriented and have leveraged data to make decisions in a concrete way.
• You have familiarity with Kubernetes, GCP (preferably, but AWS or Azure is great too!), Terraform Nice to have - Bonus points for Helm, Docker, ArgoCD, CircleCI, DataDog, and of course GraphQL!

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. Apollo wants to empower every software team to build an amazing user experience across any number of clients, without dealing with a barrage of API endpoints. 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 https://www.apollographql.com/CCPA-Privacy-Notice-for-Employees.pdf. 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 https://www.e-verify.gov.

• Show deep Kubernetes and Terraform expertise with concrete artifacts: Include a GitHub repo or self‑hosted demo that provisions a multi‑node cluster via Terraform, configures Argo CD pipelines, and automates SLO/SLA monitoring (e.g., Prometheus alerts, Grafana dashboards). Reference real metrics (latency, error‑budget burn) to prove you can drive operational excellence at scale.
• Demonstrate “event‑driven” problem solving: Build a small event‑sourcing proof‑of‑concept (e.g., using NATS or Kafka) that processes a stream, updates a materialized view, and showcases eventual consistency handling. Write a short blog post or markdown readme that explains the design trade‑offs—Apollo interviewers love seeing you “butter your bread with evented systems.”

• Quantify tech‑debt reduction with Excel‑style analysis: Prepare a one‑page Excel (or Google Sheets) model that tracks existing platform debt (open tickets, time‑to‑resolution, cost of manual ops) and projects ROI of automation (e.g., Atlantis PR automation saving X hours/month). Attach this as a PDF in your application; it signals you can turn data into actionable business value.
• Tailor your resume to Apollo’s core values: Highlight any experience with SRE‑style incident post‑mortems, SLO definition, and “Ops as code.” Use the exact terminology from the job posting (Service Delivery, Infrastructure Management, CI/CD, Operational Excellence). Pair each bullet with measurable outcomes (e.g., “Reduced mean‑time‑to‑recovery by 40 % through automated rollbacks in Argo”).
• Negotiate with market‑specific data: Research recent senior platform engineer salaries on levels.fyi and Glassdoor for remote US/Canada roles (average $170‑$210 k total compensation). Prepare a concise “compensation package” slide that lists your base, equity, and remote‑work stipends, and be ready to cite your automation impact metrics as justification for the higher end of the range.