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Software Engineer — Search & Indexing Platform, Apple Ads

Apple· Hyderabad, Telangana, India Software and Services
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full-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

Apple Ads team seeking a Software Engineer to join the core search and indexing platform responsible for real-time ad retrieval, indexing millions of campaigns, and providing low-latency queries at scale. The role covers the full search stack from index construction to candidate ranking and production reliability, with a shift from batch to streaming-first indexing and on-device ML scoring at retrieval time.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and maintain large-scale distributed search and indexing systems that power real-time ad retrieval
  • Develop streaming index pipelines that reflect advertiser campaign changes in near-real-time, replacing legacy batch-only workflows
  • Build and optimize retrieval components including inverted indexes, approximate nearest neighbor (ANN/EBR) indexes, query tree generation, and candidate ranking at the leaf level
  • Implement ad eligibility and filtering logic at retrieval time — including keyword matching, audience targeting, budget enforcement, frequency capping, and policy compliance
  • Drive platform generalization — abstracting core retrieval capabilities (matching, eligibility, scoring, ranking) into a shared base stack that new ad placements can build on without rebuilding from scratch
  • Build auto-scaling infrastructure to eliminate manual capacity operations and support organic demand growth
  • Develop observability and debugging tooling to give engineers real-time visibility into index state, query behavior, and candidate retrieval outcomes
  • Contribute to offline experimentation infrastructure that allows ML teams to evaluate new ranking and matching models without risk to production traffic
  • Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response for production search and indexing systems

Qualifications

  • 3+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on backend or distributed systems
  • Strong programming skills in one or more of: Rust, C++, Java, or Scala
  • Deep understanding of search and information retrieval fundamentals — inverted indexes, posting lists, forward/reverse index construction, tokenization, query parsing, and sharding
  • Hands-on experience building and operating high-throughput, low-latency distributed services with tight SLA requirements
  • Experience with streaming data infrastructure such as Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, or equivalent systems
  • Familiarity with container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes) and operating services in large-scale cloud environments
  • Experience with embedding-based retrieval (EBR) or approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search systems
  • Background in advertising technology — ad serving, candidate retrieval, auction systems, bid resolution, or L1/L2 ranking pipelines
  • Experience deploying ML models in latency-sensitive inference environments, including feature serving and model lifecycle management
  • Familiarity with A/B experimentation platforms and offline evaluation pipelines for ranking and retrieval
  • Experience designing and migrating systems from batch-only to streaming-first architectures
  • Track record of improving developer tooling and code quality in large, collaborative codebases — including test coverage automation, schema management, and CI/CD pipeline improvements
Last updated Aug 7, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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