Staff Software Engineer, GraphQL

About This RoleAI processing…

Key Responsibilities

• 1
  Embrace an AI-first engineering approach, using LLM-powered agents to generate and iterate on code while you focus on problem-solving, system design, and quality oversight.
• 2
  Investigate and resolve complex production issues by analyzing distributed traces, resource utilization patterns, and system metrics to identify root causes and implement durable fixes.
• 3
  Design and implement observability features including span instrumentation, SLO dashboards, and fine-grained attribution for blocking time, memory, and CPU across tenant workloads.
• 4
  Develop and iterate on tooling for deployment triage, service health monitoring, and incident response automation using LLM capabilities.
• 5
  Lead technical design discussions and RFCs for initiatives like performance regression testing pipelines, emergency deployment workflows, and runtime resiliency improvements.
• 6
  Partner with tenant teams to debug performance issues, provide guidance on GraphQL best practices, and enable self-service capabilities for common operational tasks.
• 7
  Contribute to open-source Viaduct by ensuring platform improvements are generalizable and well-documented for the broader engineering community.

Requirements

• 9+ years of software engineering experience, with significant depth in backend systems, distributed architectures, and platform engineering.
• Deep expertise in observability and monitoring, including experience designing SLO frameworks, distributed tracing systems, and metrics pipelines at scale.
• Proven track record in reliability engineering, with hands-on experience in incident response, root cause analysis, and building systems that maintain high availability (99.99%+).
• Strong experience with performance tuning and resource management in JVM-based systems, including profiling, garbage collection optimization, and understanding of concurrency models (blocking I/O, thread pools, coroutines in Kotlin).
• Experience operating critical, high-traffic systems with a focus on deployment safety, automated rollbacks, and progressive delivery strategies.
• Familiarity with GraphQL or similar API gateway/data access layer technologies
• Experience building developer tooling and platforms, with a product mindset focused on developer experience and self-service capabilities.
• Strong leadership and communication skills with the ability to partner effectively across infrastructure and product engineering teams.

Perks & Benefits