Senior AI Software Engineer (US)

Zapata Quantum is a quantum software company focused on applying quantum computing to real-world applications. The company is seeking a Senior AI Software Engineer to design and build knowledge graphs, ontologies, and AI-enabled applications, including scalable graph retrieval systems and agentic pipelines. The role involves full-stack development, architectural decision-making, collaboration across teams, and shipping production software.

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

Requirements:

• 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
• Knowledge graphs and ontologies
• RAG/retrieval systems
• Graph databases / Cypher (Neo4j)
• Vector databases (e.g. Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, FAISS)
• Agentic Design Patterns
• Data Pipeline Design
• React
• Supabase / PostgreSQL
• GCP / Firebase
• TypeScript / JavaScript
• Python
• AI-assisted development (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor)
• an interest in scientific applications