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Senior Distributed Systems Engineer - Services Special Projects

Apple· Software and Services
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Cupertino, CA$184.7k - $324.8kFull-timePosted 3d ago

About the role

Senior backend engineer to design, build, and operate massively scalable, highly available services powering Apple customer experiences. Focus on multi-tenant platform, AI/ML-powered services, and end-to-end scalability, fault tolerance, and low-latency processing across real-time transactions, analytics, and content delivery.

Responsibilities

  • Design and build new features and services with a focus on scalability, responsiveness, fault tolerance, and high availability.
  • Design and build large-scale backend services that are resilient to failures, without breaking downstream consumers.
  • Partner with search/ranking teams, ML Teams and business teams to ship customer-facing features through performant, well-modeled service APIs.
  • Provide technical guidance and mentorship, fostering a culture of learning and growth.

Qualifications

  • Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field
  • 8+ years of professional software development experience building scalable, distributed systems in production
  • Experience building, authoring, and operating large-scale, multi-tiered distributed systems and customer-facing web services: including API design, authentication, authorization, scaling for high availability, concurrency, and reliability
  • Strong understanding of concurrency and multi-threaded programming, fundamental data structures, and efficient algorithm design
  • Strong proficiency in Java; working knowledge of a second systems language (Go, C++) is a plus
  • Solid OO analysis and design skills
  • Strong proficiency in application frameworks (Spring boot)
  • Hands on experience with JVM performance tuning and profiling - GC selection/tuning, JFR, async-profiler, heap/thread-dump analysis for low-latency services
  • Hands-on with async and reactive JVM stacks: Netty, Project Reactor, RxJava, Vert.x, or Micronaut/Quarkus
  • Rigorous testing discipline with JUnit 5, Mockito, AssertJ, Testcontainers, and contract testing
  • Hands on experience with build and dependency management with Gradle
  • Deep understanding of transactional consistency models - ACID semantics, with deep knowledge of tradeoffs between relational and NoSQL database technologies
  • Expertise with synchronous and asynchronous network I/O and RPC frameworks (gRPC)
  • Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar) for automated testing, build, and deployment of production services
  • Experience with AWS or GCP and cloud-native tooling (Docker, Kubernetes) in deploying scalable production-grade services
  • Experience with event streaming and queueing systems (Kafka) and stream processing frameworks and high-throughput, append-only write paths for durable, queryable historical records
  • Hands-on experience with data storage (Iceberg, Cassandra) and caching technologies (Redis) in production services
  • Hands-on experience with Serialization/schema tooling: Jackson, Protobuf, Avro, and Schema Registry
  • Experience identifying, triaging, and remediating security vulnerabilities in production services (dependency management, secure code review, threat modeling)
  • Self-motivated, with strong collaboration and communication skills in a fast-paced, agile environment
  • Experience with machine learning systems, ML frameworks, libraries and algorithms
  • Familiarity with deployment and optimization of large-scale production-grade AI services that require GPUs in the path of the transaction
  • Hands-on experience deploying, serving, and optimizing LLMs or ML models directly in the transaction/request path
  • Experience with security and cryptography (e.g., TLS, X.509 certificates) identity and access management protocols (OAuth2/OIDC/SAML), and secure token/session lifecycle management

Skills

Required:JavaSpring BootJVM tuning and profilingAsync/reactive JVM stacksDistributed systems designAPI design and securityCI/CDCloud platformsData storage and cachingSerialization toolsSecurity and cryptography

Benefits

  • Comprehensive medical and dental coverage
  • Retirement benefits
  • Discounted products and free services
  • Educational expense reimbursement (tuition)
  • Discretionary bonuses or commission payments may be available
  • Relocation assistance may be available
  • Employee stock plan participation possible
Last updated Oct 23, 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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