Staff Software Engineer, Rust (UK)

We’re helping organizations deploy supergraphs at scale using Apollo Federation. Are you passionate about building secure, high-performance, and reliable infrastructure? Do you thrive on designing systems that meet the needs of the most demanding GraphQL workloads in the world? If so, we’d love to talk to you about joining us in creating next-generation GraphQL runtime infrastructure.

Our Runtime organization owns the critical tier of GraphOS - the underlying engine central to making GraphOS a highly performant, secure, governed, and reliable self-service GraphQL platform. As a key member of the Router Core team, you’ll be at the heart of this mission, building and maintaining the de-facto standard GraphQL runtime platform, 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.
• Operate and improve durable, stable public APIs used by the world’s most 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 to ensure the reliability of mission-critical systems.

Who You Are

• You have experience with Rust and enjoy writing performant, maintainable code.
• You have expertise in systems engineering, including knowledge of stateless/fault-tolerant systems, event-driven patterns, and distributed paradigms.
• You excel at cross-team collaboration and have a “rising tide lifts all boats” mentality, positively influencing others across the organization.
• You’re passionate about GraphQL, modern developer tooling, and contributing to industry-leading innovations.
• You have a growth mindset and actively seek opportunities to learn and stay current with industry trends.
• Bonus points if you have experience with GraphQL or large-scale runtime systems!

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.

Location: This is a remote position that can be done from anywhere in the UK.

Equal Opportunity: Apollo is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a talented and diverse workforce.