{"id":736421,"url":"https://alion.io/job/zapataquantum-senior-ai-software-engineer-us","title":"Senior AI Software Engineer (US)","company":{"id":686391,"name":"Zapata Quantum","domain":"zapataquantum.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/zapataquantum","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Rippling","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Boston, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":180000,"max":250000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":250000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Graph","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":true},{"name":"Cursor","optional":true},{"name":"FAISS","optional":true},{"name":"Firebase","optional":true},{"name":"GCP","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"Milvus","optional":true},{"name":"Neo4j","optional":true},{"name":"OpenAI Codex","optional":true},{"name":"Pinecone","optional":true},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true},{"name":"React.js","optional":true},{"name":"Supabase","optional":true},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":true},{"name":"Weaviate","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-18T15:11:41Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-18","last_verified_at":"2026-10-20T17:19:32Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":63,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":63},"description":"About Zapata Quantum\nZapata Quantum is shaping the future of quantum computing: setting the standards for what’s viable, valuable, and worth building. The Company powers quantum applications across cryptography, pharmaceuticals, finance, materials discovery, defense, and beyond, translating cutting-edge research into real-world impact.\nZapata is the only organization to have contributed across every technical area of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking program, giving it a uniquely comprehensive view of what it takes to make quantum computing work in practice. Now restructured and sharply focused, Zapata Quantum stands alone as the only publicly traded, pure-play quantum software company fully dedicated to unlocking quantum’s commercial potential.\nWe’re rebuilding at a pivotal moment for the industry-bringing together a team that will help define how quantum delivers value in the real world, with the opportunity for meaningful ownership as we shape the commercial path forward.\nAbout the role\nWe are seeking a hands-on Senior Software Engineer to design and build a knowledge graph, ontology, and AI-enabled application related to quantum computing and design. You will work across the stack, with particular focus on the architecture and implementation of knowledge graphs, ontologies, graph and vector databases, RAG, on a small but mighty engineering team. Building, maintaining, and designing scalable graph retrieval based AI applications.\nThis position offers a high level of ownership and is well suited to an engineer who is comfortable working across the stack, solving ambiguous technical problems, and remaining deeply involved in product development. You will be encouraged to experiment boldly with emerging technologies, evaluate new approaches, and apply them thoughtfully to unlock breakthrough performance and deliver outsized impact.\nThis position is classified as exempt under applicable wage and hour laws and requires the regular exercise of independent judgment and discretion in leading the design, architecture, and development of software systems.\nThe pay range for this position $180,000 - $250,000 per year.\nPlease note: A handwritten cover letter is required. Candidates who meet this requirement will hear from us within 3 days.\nWhat you'll do\nDesign and build systems involving knowledge graphs, ontologies, graph and vector databases, RAG, and related AI-enabled application functionality.\nDesign and implement scalable agentic pipelines, involving custom agent tools, loops, and evaluation techniques for agentic systems\nDesign, architect, build, and continuously improve a modern, interactive web application, including selecting appropriate frameworks, and designing intuitive user interfaces..\nFamiliarity with cloud platforms and system design \nMake architectural and product-related technical decisions, exercising independent judgment when evaluating tools, technologies, tradeoffs, and design patterns.\nDesign and implement backend systems, data models, APIs, data pipelines, and integrations that support complex application functionality.\nIntegrate AI-enabled features such as intelligent search, retrieval, recommendations, contextual assistance, and other emerging application capabilities.\nCollaborate with product, design, domain experts, and company leadership to translate business and user needs into practical technical solutions.\nRemain deeply involved in software development, personally writing, testing, debugging, and shipping production code.\nContribute to engineering standards and best practices for software design, code quality, testing, documentation, security, and maintainability.\nEvaluate and adopt emerging technologies, including AI-assisted development tools, when they can meaningfully improve productivity, quality, or application performance.\nQualifications\n5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial recent experience personally writing and shipping production code.\nStrong full-stack engineering fundamentals\nDemonstrated experience with knowledge graphs, ontologies, RAG, retrieval systems, graph databases, vector databases, or related technologies.\nDemonstrated experience designing, building, and maintaining production-quality, user-facing web applications.\nExperience making architectural decisions and evaluating technical tradeoffs across frontend, backend, data, infrastructure, and application integrations.\nExperience using AI tools for engineering across development, testing, deployment and observability. \nStrong understanding of UI/UX principles and product usability, with the ability to translate complex information into intuitive user experiences.\nAbility to rapidly prototype technical approaches and determine when to prioritize speed, simplicity, scalability, or long-term maintainability.\nAbility to work autonomously, manage competing priorities, and deliver results with minimal oversight.\nStrong communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to explain technical decisions to both technical and nontechnical stakeholders.\nAbility 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\nComfortable and familiar with working in a startup environment\nDesired Programming Skills\nKnowledge graphs and ontologies\nRAG/retrieval systems\nGraph databases / Cypher (Neo4j)\nVector databases (e.g. Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, FAISS)\nAgentic Design Patterns \nData Pipeline Design\nReact \nSupabase / PostgreSQL\nGCP / Firebase\nTypeScript / JavaScript\nPython\nAI-assisted development (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor)","description_format":"text","description_chars":5671,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Quantum Science & Computing"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-11T11:12:04Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":18,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.514,"p_room":0.36,"age_days":62,"expected_fill_days":36,"reasons":["conf:1","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":250000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/zapataquantum-senior-ai-software-engineer-us","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/zapataquantum-senior-ai-software-engineer-us.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-20T18:48:31Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":21618,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-21T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":686391},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=686391"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fzapataquantum-senior-ai-software-engineer-us"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fzapataquantum-senior-ai-software-engineer-us"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fzapataquantum-senior-ai-software-engineer-us"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/zapataquantum-senior-ai-software-engineer-us\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fzapataquantum-senior-ai-software-engineer-us"}]}