Principal Software Engineer (Hybrid, San Francisco)

About Apollo

Apollo is the AI-powered go-to-market platform that helps revenue teams find, engage, and convert their best customers. We combine a database of more than 210 million contacts and 35 million companies with an agentic end-to-end GTM platform, and more than 500,000 companies rely on us to run their go-to-market motion. We are profitable, growing fast, and rebuilding the product around AI and agents.

Your role and mission

You will set technical direction at the level of the whole engineering organization. You will own the hardest, most ambiguous, and highest-stakes technical bets, the ones that shape the product for years, and you will be a force multiplier across many teams. Your judgment will be a reference point for how we build, and your impact will be felt org-wide rather than on any single team.

What you will do

• Own the technical direction of Apollo's most critical and most ambiguous problems, across team and organizational boundaries
• Make the architectural bets that shape the product and platform over multiple years, and be accountable for how they play out
• Set the technical strategy for the rebuild around AI and agents, and turn it into direction teams can execute
• Raise the engineering bar across the whole organization through the standards, patterns, and decisions you drive
• Multiply the output of engineers and teams far beyond your own code, through design, review, and mentorship of our most senior engineers
• Partner with engineering and product leadership as a peer on where the technology needs to go. 

How we work: AI-native by default

You set the standard for what AI-native engineering looks like at the highest level. You use agents to move faster on the hardest design, investigation, and implementation work, you define the practices other engineers adopt, and you find the step-change bets where AI reshapes how we build the product, not just how fast we ship.

What we are looking for

• A track record of setting technical direction that shaped a product or platform across an entire engineering organization
• Depth across distributed systems and architecture, and command of the reliability, scale, and cost tradeoffs behind company-defining decisions
• The judgment to make the hardest calls under ambiguity, and the influence to align many teams behind them
• A record of multiplying the most senior engineers around you. Genuine, current fluency with AI-assisted development, and a clear point of view on where AI takes engineering next

Our tech stack

React on the front end; Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Python, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch on the backend; Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform in infrastructure; GCP for cloud.

What you will love about Apollo

You will own the technical bets that define the company, work as a peer to engineering and product leadership, and have the scope and AI tooling to shape how a fast-moving organization builds.