Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

Apple; Hyderabad; On-site; INR 2,500,000 - 4,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple Ads is seeking a Software Engineer to join the Ad Delivery Services team responsible for runtime and offline systems that decide eligibility and serve ads with tight latency budgets.

You will design and operate high-throughput backend services, own one or more delivery capabilities end-to-end, and build near-real-time data pipelines. Collaborate with adserver, auction, ML, and data platform teams across Apple Ads.

Qualifications

• 2–5 years of backend/distributed systems experience.
• Proficient in Java/Spring, with concurrency and JVM performance.
• Experience building high-throughput, low-latency services (<100 ms).
• Knowledge of REST/gRPC, timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, backpressure.
• Experience with Kafka or similar streaming platforms.
• Cloud platforms (AWS preferred), containers, and CI/CD.
• Strong observability: metrics, logging, alerts, on-call ownership.
• Experience with AI in development or AI-based tooling.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate low-latency backend services in ad delivery.
• Own one or more Ad Delivery capability areas end-to-end.
• Build near-real-time data pipelines for spend, policy, targeting, quality.
• Define service contracts with adserver and related platforms.
• Implement fail-closed semantics and structured reason codes.
• Contribute to shared data-grid for local region lookups.
• Build observability, debugging, and replay tooling.
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response.
• Collaborate with Cupertino, Austin, and Hyderabad engineers in one-team model.

Skills

Java / Spring

Concurrency / JVM performance

REST / gRPC

Kafka / streaming

AWS / cloud

Kubernetes / container orchestration

CI/CD

Observability (metrics/logging)

AI for development

Tools

Spark

Flink

Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Summary

Apple Ads helps developers and businesses reach customers on the App Store through highly relevant, privacy-focused advertising. Our engineering teams build the infrastructure that powers ad delivery at Apple scale — from search and retrieval to auction, ranking, and measurement.

Description

We are looking for a Software Engineer to join the team responsible for Apple Ads' Ad Delivery Services — the runtime and offline systems that decide, for every ad request, which candidates are eligible, safe, and available to serve.

Ad Delivery Services sit on the critical path of every impression Apple Ads serves. The team owns capability areas across Budget & Spend, Ad Delivery Policy, Traffic Quality, Request & Query Understanding, and Targeting Enrichment. Each capability is a low-latency service called inline during ad serving, plus the offline pipelines that keep it accurate.

You will design and operate services that handle high request volumes with tight latency budgets, evolve them to support new ad placements and product surfaces, and partner closely with adserver, auction, ML, and data platform teams across Apple Ads.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate low-latency backend services that participate in every ad request, with strict SLAs and fail-safe behavior
• Own one or more Ad Delivery capability areas end-to-end — from service design and data contracts to production operations
• Build near-real-time data pipelines that keep runtime services accurate: spend counters, policy rules, targeting attributes, and traffic-quality signals
• Define and evolve service contracts with the adserver and adjacent platforms (auction, ranking, experimentation, retrieval)
• Implement fail-closed semantics — when a signal is missing or stale, safely decline to serve and emit a structured reason code that flows through the downstream funnel
• Contribute to a shared data-grid plane used by ad serving for local, region-replicated lookups
• Build observability, debugging, and replay tooling so on-call engineers can quickly reason about eligibility, spend, and policy decisions
• Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response for production ad-delivery systems
• Partner with engineers across Cupertino, Austin, and Hyderabad in a one-team model

Minimum Qualifications

• 2-5 years of software engineering experience with a focus on backend or distributed systems
• Strong programming skills in Java (Spring / Spring Boot), including concurrency and JVM performance
• Hands-on experience building and operating high-throughput, low-latency services with sub-100 ms latency budgets
• Solid understanding of service design fundamentals — REST/gRPC APIs, timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, backpressure, and graceful degradation
• Experience with streaming data infrastructure such as Apache Kafka or equivalent
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS preferred), container orchestration, and CI/CD
• Strong operational instincts — metrics, logging, alerting, and on-call ownership
• Hands-on experience with using AI for development and/or building AI-based tools

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in Advertising technology — ad serving, budget pacing, spend accounting, policy enforcement, fraud/traffic quality, or query understanding
• Experience with near-real-time counter systems at scale
• Experience with KV stores and region-replicated caches, and reasoning about staleness and consistency
• Familiarity with information retrieval basics — query normalization, tokenization, stemming, spell correction, close/broad variants
• Background in trust and safety, bot detection, or fraud prevention systems
• Experience with offline enrichment pipelines (Spark, Flink, or equivalent) alongside runtime services
• Track record of improving developer tooling, test coverage, and platform ergonomics in a large shared codebase

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Role Number: 200677235-1052