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Distinguished Engineer – Quality Engineering & Performance, Wallet, Payments & Commerce

Apple· Software and Services
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Cupertino, California, United States, San Diego, California, United States$262.5k - $394kfull-timePosted 7mo ago

About the role

Distinguished Engineer to define and lead end-to-end Quality Engineering and Performance strategy for Apple’s Wallet, Payments & Commerce ecosystem. Architect systemic reliability, scalability, resilience, and measurable engineering excellence across a critical, regulated platform. Not a test leadership role; a platform-defining technical authority reporting to the head of Quality & Performance software engineering.

Responsibilities

  • Define the long-term vision for Quality Engineering, Performance Engineering, Reliability, and Production Validation across WPC.
  • Architect systemic reliability frameworks spanning development, pre-production, and runtime environments.
  • Establish and govern SLO/SLA standards, latency budgets, scalability targets, and risk tolerance models.
  • Lead cross-organizational initiatives to embed “quality by design” into distributed financial systems.
  • Partner with Architecture, Platform, Infrastructure, Security, Compliance, and Business teams to ensure systems meet user experience standards and regulatory requirements.
  • Elevate QE & Performance from functional support to strategic engineering leverage.
  • Mentor and grow senior technical leaders across global teams.
  • Reliability & Resilience Architecture: Define and evolve WPC’s reliability engineering framework; champion chaos engineering, failover validation, and disaster recovery; establish systemic defect prevention methodologies.
  • Performance Engineering Strategy: Define performance budgets and latency targets; lead large-scale optimization across cloud-native infrastructure (AWS and hybrid); balance scalability, cost-efficiency, and customer experience.
  • Quality as a Platform: Architect automation platforms for millions of weekly test executions; drive AI-assisted test generation, log analysis, anomaly detection, and validation systems; define release governance to minimize regression risk while accelerating delivery velocity.
  • Observability & Production Validation: Establish end-to-end observability standards; embed real-time quality telemetry; define health indicators and engineering scorecards across WPC.
  • Organizational Influence: Serve as technical authority in senior forums; drive alignment across WPC, Infrastructure, and broader Apple engineering; mentor Principal and Senior Engineers in distributed systems reliability and performance design.

Qualifications

  • Deep expertise in reliability engineering, large-scale automation systems, and performance engineering for distributed systems.
  • Experience defining SLO/SLA frameworks for mission-critical systems at massive scale.
  • Proven track record architecting resilience strategies across cloud-native environments (AWS or comparable platforms).
  • Experience working with regulated financial or high-trust systems.
  • Demonstrated ability to influence architectural direction across large, complex organizations.
  • Strong background in observability, telemetry systems, and production validation strategies.
  • Experience embedding AI/ML-driven validation or engineering productivity systems.
  • Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts to executive and engineering audiences.
  • Demonstrated success mentoring and elevating senior technical leaders.
  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
  • Experience in payment systems, money movement, tokenization, or transaction processing.
  • Experience in testing global multi-region failover architectures.
  • Background in large-scale automated testing platforms (server, UI, API, distributed systems).
  • Familiarity with compliance-driven system design in financial ecosystems.
  • Experience evolving engineering culture toward measurable reliability and performance ownership.

Skills

Required:Reliability engineeringPerformance engineeringObservability & telemetrySLO/SLA framework designCommunication to executivesMentoring
Nice to have:AI/ML-driven validation

Benefits

  • Comprehensive medical and dental coverage
  • retirement benefits
  • discounted products and free services
  • reimbursement for certain educational expenses (tuition)
  • discretionary bonuses or commission payments (possible)
  • relocation assistance (possible)
  • Apple shareholder opportunities through stock programs
  • Employee Stock Purchase Plan
Last updated Jul 3, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Apple

Discover the innovative world of Apple and shop everything iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV, plus explore accessories, entertainment, and expert device support.

Discover the innovative world of Apple and shop everything iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV, plus explore accessories, entertainment, and expert device support.

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