Platform Engineer for Operational Data

Apple Inc.; Greater London; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading tech company is seeking a Platform Engineer for Operational Data in London. In this role, you will develop solutions for an internal developer platform, focusing on distributed system architecture and automation practices. Candidates should have comprehensive experience in software engineering with strong skills in data services and cloud-native applications. The role requires collaboration, clear communication, and a commitment to continuous learning.

Qualifications

• Experience as a software engineer with a product-oriented approach.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems.
• Clear communication skills for diverse audiences.

Responsibilities

• Work with platform users to enable adoption.
• Contribute to technical alignment between platform functions.
• Focus on data services convergence.

Skills

Distributed systems fundamentals

Effective communication

Problem-solving

Collaboration

Continuous learning

Tools

AWS

Java

Kotlin

Kubernetes

Container orchestration

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

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Platform Engineer for Operational Data

London, England, United Kingdom Software and Services

At Apple, great ideas quickly become phenomenal products, services, and customer experiences. Apple Pay has brought the Apple Wallet to millions of customers worldwide, enabling them to carry digital credentials such as credit and debit cards, transit passes, hotel and car keys, theme park tickets — and now, mobile driver’s licences — all in their Apple Wallet. Building and scaling these features requires not just world-class engineering, but a deep understanding of how institutions around the world operate, implement standards, and protect user data and privacy.You'll have the opportunity to tackle the intricate challenge of building resilient and reliable distributed software systems at Apple's scale as a Developer Platform Engineer at the intersection between data platform and operational data components and microservices architecture. You will be given flexibility to explore creative solutions, the support of a talented and driven team, and access to diverse technologies. You will have the autonomy, and responsibility, to take full ownership of your solutions.The role is a hands-on contributor to our internal developer platform. You will engineer solutions contributing to both tech stacks and bring the appropriate degree of convergence. You will navigate the layers between application, platform, cloud, and infrastructure engineering. This will be coding, architecture and operational work in a DevOps team.You'll join a nimble team involved in every stage of the platform-as-a-product and will design, build, test, deliver and maintain exceptional software that truly makes a difference. In this fast-paced environment, you'll be hands-on in all phases, and will actively shape the architecture and design of our platforms and offerings through the lived experience of operating, monitoring, and providing on-call support for the software you build.One key area of responsibility would be dev, prod operations, automation, and cross-functional efforts to facilitate adoption of the platform capabilities by the wider WPC organisation and their use in production. Our solutions are shaped by deep understanding of the problems which will inform what we build in the platform.This role values deep technical expertise and its application in a simple, opinionated internal developer platform. The ultimate goal of our platform is two-fold: modernise the technical stack and the engineering culture in our organisation. The success metric is platform adoption and its continuous use inside WPC, to continue shipping amazing Apple products.The use cases that rely on our work range from customer-facing to internal back office, near-real-time and batch, event-driven microservices and OLTP and OLAP workloads. The products we look after form an internal developer platform that favours simplicity and common solutions with a high degree of automation and composability.This role may require occasional international travel.

Description

As a key member of the team, you'll participate in technical discussions, write specifications, review code, and produce documentation. Success in this role therefore requires strong self-motivation, crisp and clear communication, a highly collaborative approach, and the ability to work effectively across teams and disciplines.

Responsibilities

• Work with our platform users to enable adoption and work tactically at the right level between all aspects of the platform or the services we leverage. We are here to enable others.
• Contribute to technical alignment between all functions offered by the platform. You will work a lot in the integration and complementarity of the services, aiming to converge the solutions space towards a simple, reusable and opinionated set.
• Have a particular focus on data services convergence: transactional, at rest and in transit. This will extend to the integration with analytical systems and cross-functional support (for example data compliance, data contracts)
• Be a product advocate for the platform itself: notice the opportunities between different solutions, assess whether a platform solution would bring value and work on the delivery of this. Our objective is to pursue a platform-as-a-product delivery.
• Provide hands-on, evidence-based and example-based decisions. Sometimes this means getting familiar with technologies you did not know before
• Drive the platform itself and the culture to a model of modern engineering practices.
• Guide foundational and architectural design and delivery— including education, documentation and collaborative delivery. Our work must be approachable.

Minimum Qualifications

• Comprehensive experience as a software engineer and product-oriented architecture.
• A solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals.
• An ability to communicate thoughtfully and clearly, both verbally and in writing, to discuss complex technical concepts with diverse audiences, including global teams and external partners.
• The tenacity and perseverance to drive a complex project all the way from conception to production.
• No formal degree is required. What matters most is your mindset, your initiative, and your ability to apply your skills to real-world applications.

Preferred Qualifications

• A commitment to continuous learning and improvement, and curiosity for new technologies, techniques and patterns in pursuit of engineering excellence.
• A track record of building and sustaining healthy long-term relationships within your team, and beyond its boundaries.
• Practical experience with internal developer platform and commodity data engineering products with bonus points for working in the overlap between services and data.
• Demonstrable experience of working on a data mesh or an event mesh or similar architectures.
• Experience converging evolving diverse and varied architectures into unified opinionated solutions.
• Been an advocate for continuous delivery, DevOps and similar best practices and familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code.
• Familiarity with our technical stack and its major components: AWS, Java, Kotlin, HTTP/REST, gRPC, container orchestration with Kubernetes and the management plane with Controller and Operators, Data Science tools like Iceberg, Spark, Flink, SQL/NoSQL databases (e.g. Aurora, DynamoDB, CockroachDB, Oracle).
• Time spent architecting, building, supporting or otherwise working on cloud-native (e.g. AWS) applications with resilience as a core feature.
• Experience with observability tools (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog).
• An appreciation for, and understanding of security, privacy, and cryptography.

At Apple, we’re not all the same. And that’s our greatest strength. We draw on the differences in who we are, what we’ve experienced and how we think. Because to create products that serve everyone, we believe in including everyone. Therefore, we are committed to treating all applicants fairly and equally. As a registered Disability Confident employer, we will work with applicants to make any reasonable accommodations. Apple will consider for employment all qualified applicants with criminal backgrounds in a manner consistent with applicable law. Learn more