Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Apollo GraphQL is a leading technology company known for its innovative GraphQL solutions. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join their Orchestration Language team, where the primary focus will be on building and maintaining Apollo's MCP Server and GraphOS MCP Tools, enhancing the interaction between AI agents and federated graphs.
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)
Skills
- 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
- 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
Company Overview
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