Lead Platform Engineer - Apollo Federation & GraphQL

Cox Automotive Inc.; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 135,000 - 225,000; Full time

Job summary

Cox Automotive Inc. is seeking a Lead Platform Engineer to design and scale a federated GraphQL platform (DriveQ supergraph) that unifies multiple enterprise data domains and drives internal and external products.

The role focuses on scaling Apollo Federation infrastructure, multi-tenant routing, and evolving capabilities like contracts, billing, and data analytics, while providing technical ownership across an evolving ecosystem.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a related discipline with 6 years of experience.
• Experience building distributed systems and APIs at scale.
• Proficiency in TypeScript, Java, or Python with Apollo Server / Strawberry.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure (AWS, ECS/Kubernetes).
• Authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop federated GraphQL (Apollo) architecture, including schema design, subgraph integration, and supergraph evolution.
• Build and scale Apollo router infrastructure, supporting multi-region deployments, routing, and failover.
• Implement CI/CD pipelines and governance workflows to ensure safe schema evolution and avoid breaking API changes.
• Develop capabilities for multi-tenant routing and Apollo contracts to support external and internal product use cases.
• Contribute to platform-level initiatives such as usage telemetry, billing data capture, and Snowflake integration.
• Partner with data, platform, and product teams to onboard new subgraphs and improve discoverability.
• Lead technical design discussions and mentor junior engineers.

Skills

Federated GraphQL

Distributed systems

APIs at scale

TypeScript

Java

Python

AWS

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Apollo Federation

Apollo Server

Strawberry GraphQL

Snowflake

S3

DNS routing

Terraform

Job description

Cox Automotive Inc. is seeking a Lead Platform Engineer to design and scale a federated GraphQL platform (DriveQ supergraph) that unifies multiple enterprise data domains and drives internal and external products.

The role focuses on scaling Apollo Federation infrastructure, multi-tenant routing, and evolving capabilities like contracts, billing, and data analytics, while providing technical ownership across an evolving ecosystem.