Software Development Engineer II

The Software Development Engineer II role would be supporting the GRACE Development Team within ARPA-H. This role focuses on building production-scale agentic AI systems, LLM-powered applications, backend services, and cloud-based AI infrastructure supporting GRACE, ARPA-H’s production AI assistant.

• mplement and enhance GRACE’s agentic workflows including tool-calling, multi-step reasoning, memory, and A2A communication patterns
• Build and maintain MCP client-side integrations enabling agents to discover and invoke tools
• Develop tool definitions, schemas, retry logic, error handling, and formatting for GRACE’s tool ecosystem
• Contribute to multi-agent orchestration patterns that are reliable and production-ready
• Implement LLM orchestration logic including prompt construction, context management, model selection, and response parsing
• Build and maintain RAG pipeline capabilities including query formulation, citation grounding, ranking, and hallucination mitigation
• Develop prompt engineering patterns and system prompts supporting multiple LLM providers
• Contribute to context window budget management including truncation, summarization, and pagination logic
• Build LLM evaluation components including grounding assessments, regression tests, safety checks, and quality metrics
• Develop secure backend application features and API integrations end-to-end
• Integrate with internal and external APIs including Dimensions, Google Search, Slack, SharePoint, and LLM provider APIs
• Contribute to monitoring, logging, distributed tracing, and system observability
• Implement fallback, retry, and graceful degradation patterns for AI service dependencies
• Work within Microsoft Azure infrastructure including Azure Functions, API Management, Container Apps, and Azure OpenAI Service
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and infrastructure-as-code practices
• Participate in design reviews, sprint planning, and retrospectives
• Collaborate closely with product managers, researchers, designers, and senior engineers to implement technical solutions
• Ensure strong privacy, security, and compliance across all systems and integrations
• Write production-quality code that is readable, tested, documented, and maintainable

Do you have experience in Python?, Do you have a Master’s degree?, * Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems
• Proven experience contributing to the delivery of real products in fast-paced environments
• Strong proficiency in Python and at least one additional backend programming language
• Experience with algorithms, distributed systems, APIs, and software design patterns
• Experience with AWS, GCP, or Microsoft Azure cloud platforms
• Experience with Docker, containerization, and CI/CD pipelines
• Experience building features on top of LLMs including tool-calling, RAG, multi-step reasoning, and context management preferred
• Familiarity with A2A communication patterns and multi-agent orchestration frameworks preferred
• Familiarity with MCP integrations and prompt engineering concepts preferred
• Experience with LLM evaluation, grounding assessment, and AI system testing preferred
• Familiarity with token economics, context budget management, and prompt efficiency preferred
• Experience with Azure Functions, API Management, Container Apps, or Azure OpenAI Service preferred
• Knowledge of secrets management, least-privilege access, and security-conscious engineering preferred
• Strong communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills
• Ability to work collaboratively in cross-functional environments
• Experience in startup, early-stage, or regulated environments preferred