Staff Software Engineer - Trust and Telemetry
Apollo GraphQL · United States
If you want your work to directly protect and empower thousands of engineering teams operating GraphQL at scale, this role puts you at the heart of that mission. The Trust & Telemetry team at Apollo powers two pillars of the GraphOS platform: the data and observability layer that helps teams understand how their graphs behave, and the identity and access management layer that ensures they can be trusted.
We are actively building OAuth, SSO, and audit logging capabilities, migrating telemetry infrastructure, and rolling out fine-grained permissions. This is greenfield and foundational work with high visibility across Apollo's enterprise customer base.
Who We Are
The Trust & Telemetry team is organized around two domains:
Telemetry: We surface usage, performance, and schema insights that help teams safely evolve and scale their graphs. This means owning the pipelines, APIs, and UX that translate raw telemetry data into actionable visibility.
Trust: We own identity, access management, and auditing for GraphOS. From OAuth and SSO to fine-grained role-based tokens and audit logs, we make sure the right people can do the right things—and that there's a record when they do.
What You'll Do
As a Staff Software Engineer on TnT, you'll take real ownership of features and systems across both domains. You'll work closely with product, design, and partner engineering teams to ship meaningful improvements to enterprise customers.
In this role, you will:
Own a TnT subdomain: Take technical responsibility for a component—whether it's our OAuth/SSO flows, audit logging infrastructure, telemetry ingestion pipelines, or fine-grained permissions model.
Drive features end-to-end: Write design docs, get alignment, implement, test, deploy, and monitor your work in production.
Build for enterprise reliability: Design with observability, rollback paths, and incremental delivery in mind. Participate in on-call and postmortems.
Collaborate across functions: Work directly with Product and Design to scope and prioritize work. Communicate clearly and async-first.
Grow as an engineer: Contribute to code reviews, design discussions, and technical standards. Receive and give constructive feedback within the team.
What We're Looking For
Required Skills
Material, hands-on experience building auth systems: OAuth 2.0/OIDC, SSO, token or credential management, RBAC/ABAC or fine-grained permissions, or audit logging
Track record of leading multi-quarter or cross-team technical initiatives, mentoring engineers, and shaping technical direction
Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency, failure modes, and resiliency patterns
Experience building APIs and data models that other teams or customers depend on
Proficiency in at least one modern backend language (TypeScript/Node, Go, Rust, Java, or similar)
Experience with relational databases and at least one of: key-value, document, or time-series stores
Hands-on ownership of services in production: on-call, incident response, postmortems
Familiarity with observability tooling (metrics, tracing, logging) and SLOs
Strong written and verbal communication, especially for design docs and async collaboration
Ability to work with Product and Design to define scope, trade-offs, and delivery increments