Senior AI Software Engineer — Graph & Knowledge AI

Zapata Quantum; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Zapata Quantum is seeking a hands-on Senior Software Engineer to design and build a knowledge graph, ontology, and AI-enabled application related to quantum computing. You will work across the stack on graph and vector databases, RAG, and scalable AI-powered features.

You’ll own architecture, write production code, and influence product direction in a fast-paced startup environment, collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver impactful, real-world quantum software solutions.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial recent experience personally writing and shipping production code.
• Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals.
• Demonstrated experience with knowledge graphs, ontologies, RAG, retrieval systems, graph databases, vector databases, or related technologies.
• Demonstrated experience designing, building, and maintaining production-quality, user-facing web applications.
• Experience making architectural decisions and evaluating technical tradeoffs across frontend, backend, data, infrastructure, and application integrations.
• Experience using AI tools for engineering across development, testing, deployment and observability.
• Strong understanding of UI/UX principles and product usability, with the ability to translate complex information into intuitive user experiences.
• Ability to rapidly prototype technical approaches and determine when to prioritize speed, simplicity, scalability, or long-term maintainability.
• Ability to work autonomously, manage competing priorities, and deliver results with minimal oversight.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to explain technical decisions to both technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Ability and enthusiasm to learn unfamiliar technical domains as needed; prior quantum computing experience is not required, but an interest in scientific applications is nice to have
• Comfortable and familiar with working in a startup environment

Responsibilities

• Design and build systems involving knowledge graphs, ontologies, graph and vector databases, RAG, and related AI-enabled application functionality.
• Design and implement scalable agentic pipelines, involving custom agent tools, loops, and evaluation techniques for agentic systems
• Design, architect, build, and continuously improve a modern, interactive web application, including selecting appropriate frameworks, and designing intuitive user interfaces.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms and system design
• Make architectural and product-related technical decisions, exercising independent judgment when evaluating tools, technologies, tradeoffs, and design patterns.
• Design and implement backend systems, data models, APIs, data pipelines, and integrations that support complex application functionality.
• Integrate AI-enabled features such as intelligent search, retrieval, recommendations, contextual assistance, and other emerging application capabilities.
• Collaborate with product, design, domain experts, and company leadership to translate business and user needs into practical technical solutions.
• Remain deeply involved in software development, personally writing, testing, debugging, and shipping production code.
• Contribute to engineering standards and best practices for software design, code quality, testing, documentation, security, and maintainability.
• Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies, including AI-assisted development tools, when they can meaningfully improve productivity, quality, or application performance.

Skills

Full-stack engineering

Knowledge graphs

Ontologies

RAG

Graph databases

Vector databases

AI tooling

UI/UX understanding

Autonomous work

Communication

Tools

Neo4j (Cypher)

Pinecone

Weaviate

Milvus

FAISS

React

TypeScript

JavaScript

Python

PostgreSQL

GCP

Firebase

Job description

Zapata Quantum is seeking a hands-on Senior Software Engineer to design and build a knowledge graph, ontology, and AI-enabled application related to quantum computing. You will work across the stack on graph and vector databases, RAG, and scalable AI-powered features.

You’ll own architecture, write production code, and influence product direction in a fast-paced startup environment, collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver impactful, real-world quantum software solutions.