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Systems Architect - Apple Pay

Apple· Software and Services
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New York City$216.2k - $324.8kfull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Apple Pay builds and operates the systems that power Apple Pay transactions at global scale. This Architect role sets the technical direction for reliability, scalability, and availability of Apple Pay’s distributed systems, translating opinions into architecture, tooling, and operating practices across the organization.

Responsibilities

  • Guide the evolution of Apple Pay's distributed systems with a clear point of view on trade-offs (consistency vs. availability, latency vs. durability, cost vs. redundancy) appropriate to payment-critical infrastructure
  • Define and drive adoption of reliability engineering practices across the org: SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, error budgets, capacity planning, and failure-mode analysis tailored to systems where correctness and availability directly affect transaction success
  • Establish the observability and metrics strategy needed to operate payment systems reliably at scale — including latency, traffic, errors, distributed tracing, and alerting that reflects real transaction impact
  • Partner with teams across Apple Pay to review designs for scalability bottlenecks, points of failure, and resilience gaps
  • Write code and prototypes where it matters — diving into the codebase to validate designs, unblock teams, or resolve production issues
  • Lead technical reviews and postmortems for major incidents affecting Apple Pay systems, driving systemic fixes rather than one-off patches
  • Mentor engineers on distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, replication, partitioning, idempotency, exactly/at-least-once semantics, and trade-offs relevant to payment processing
  • Collaborate with client, server, devops, and product engineering teams to ensure architecture decisions account for real-world operational constraints (deployment, rollback, multi-region failover, capacity headroom) at Apple's global scale

Qualifications

  • Proven track record designing and operating distributed systems at scale in high-throughput, low-latency production environments
  • Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals: replication, partitioning/sharding, consensus protocols, eventual vs. strong consistency, idempotency, and failure handling across network partitions
  • Hands-on experience defining and instrumenting metrics for availability and scalability (e.g., SLOs, error budgets, distributed tracing) and using them to drive concrete engineering decisions
  • Strong background in the building blocks of scalable systems: load balancing, caching layers, message queues/event streaming, database sharding/replication, service mesh, and rate limiting/backpressure mechanisms
  • Demonstrated ability to set technical direction across multiple teams without direct management authority, and to communicate trade-offs clearly to both engineers and leadership
  • Track record of leading incident reviews or reliability programs and turning postmortem findings into durable systemic improvements
  • Skilled at operating with ambiguity across large, complex system landscapes and driving alignment across multiple teams and stakeholders
  • Experience with multi-region or globally distributed systems, including failover and disaster recovery design at scale
  • Prior experience in payments, fraud/risk systems, or other regulated, high-availability financial infrastructure
  • Contributions to open-source distributed systems projects or published technical writing on the subject
  • Experience establishing or maturing a devops/reliability practice within an organization

Skills

Required:Distributed systems design and operationReliability engineering practicesObservability and metricsCode prototyping and debuggingIncident leadership and postmortemsCommunication and influence

Benefits

  • Comprehensive medical and dental coverage
  • retirement benefits
  • range of discounted products and free services
  • reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition
  • discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation eligibility
  • Apple employee stock programs including discretionary RSU awards and Employee Stock Purchase Plan
Last updated Aug 21, 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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