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Software Engineering Technical Lead, Apple Card & Savings

Apple· Software and Services
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Cary, NCfull-timePosted 1w ago

About the role

Technical leadership role focused on architecting, building, and operating mission-critical distributed services powering Apple Card and Savings. Hands-on in code and operations, with responsibility for architecture, reliability, scalability, and collaboration with external partners.

Responsibilities

  • Architect, build, and operate mission-critical distributed services that power Apple Card and Savings at large scale
  • Lead large, multi-quarter engineering efforts — including complex integrations with financial institution and payment network partners — from conception through production
  • Drive technical discussions across teams and organizations, authoring specifications and representing Apple in external partner negotiations
  • Define and enforce service level objectives, progressive release strategies, and automation standards to eliminate manual toil
  • Lead incident response, extract operational learnings, and translate them into lasting architectural improvements
  • Review code and designs, raising the engineering bar and ensuring systems are built for testability from the outset
  • Mentor senior engineers and shape the engineering strategy and culture of the broader team
  • Define and champion the team's standards for AI-assisted development, evaluating and adopting tooling that measurably improves code quality and review throughput across the broader engineering org

Qualifications

  • A demonstrated track record of architecting, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems at large scale, while remaining hands-on in code.
  • Deep understanding of distributed systems trade-offs in consistency, latency, and throughput, and of data correctness patterns (e.g. idempotency, exactly-once processing, reconciliation).
  • Expert hands-on software development skills in Kotlin or Java.
  • Extensive operational experience: leading incident response, defining service level objectives (SLOs), and turning operational learnings into architectural improvements.
  • A track record of leading complex, cross-team projects from conception to production — including large migrations or platform changes — and driving consensus with diverse audiences such as global teams and external partners.
  • A testing-first approach to engineering: designing systems for testability from the outset, writing tests as an integral part of development, and defining testing strategy (unit, integration, contract, end-to-end) for complex services.
  • No formal degree is required. What matters most is your mindset, your initiative, and your demonstrated ability to apply advanced skills to real-world applications.
  • Experience using generative AI tools throughout the software development lifecycle to produce high-quality software.
  • Deep expertise with Spring and with high-volume REST and/or gRPC services (server-to-server or mobile client facing).
  • Experience in payments, banking, or other regulated financial domains, including leading integrations with external financial partners and designing within compliance, consumer-protection, and privacy requirements (e.g. change management, separation of duties, PCI).
  • Experience architecting containerized, cloud-native applications (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, AWS) designed for multi-region resilience, failover, graceful degradation, and self-healing, and validated through load and failure testing.
  • Experience designing CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and progressive release strategies (e.g. canary deployments, feature flags, automated rollback).
  • Experience defining observability strategy (e.g. Datadog, Splunk, OpenTelemetry), including business-level monitoring and high-quality alerts that detect issues before customers or partners do.
  • Experience with event-driven architectures and messaging (e.g. Kafka or equivalent event streaming) and optimizing SQL/NoSQL databases for scale (e.g. Aurora, DynamoDB).
  • A strong understanding of security, privacy, and cryptography for protecting sensitive customer and financial data (e.g. mTLS, PKI and certificate lifecycle management, JWT).

Skills

Required:Distributed systems design and operationKotlin or JavaIncident response and SLOsSpring and high-volume REST/gRPCPayments / regulated financial domainsContainerized/cloud-native architecturesCI/CD and infrastructure as codeObservability and monitoringEvent-driven architecturesSecurity and cryptography
Nice to have:AI-assisted development tooling
Last updated Oct 16, 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.

AirPods Max 2Apple ArcadeApple CardApple Fitness+Apple MusicApple TVApple TV+Apple Watch Series 11
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