Backend Engineer - AI-Powered Imaging & Data Pipelines

Apple, Inc.; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 278,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive medical and dental

Retirement benefits

Discounted products

Free services

Tuition reimbursement

Relocation assistance

Discretionary bonuses or commissions

Job summary

Apple is seeking a versatile Backend Software Engineer to design, build, and own backend infrastructure for imaging engineering and quality workflows across Camera, Photos, and Image Quality. You will develop and operate Python REST APIs, data models for massive image and metadata catalogs, and run long‑running asynchronous jobs.

The ideal candidate has strong distributed systems knowledge, experience hosting AI/ML models, and a track record of delivering reliable production services at scale.

Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent.
• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency in Python, with a track record of owning production backend services end to end.
• Strong understanding of REST API design and experience building and operating production REST services at scale.
• Demonstrated experience hosting and serving AI/ML models in production.
• Working knowledge of asynchronous job execution patterns for long-running computations.
• Solid understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals: consistency, coordination, failure handling.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to work effectively with partners outside of engineering.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and operate model-serving infrastructure for LLM integrations and vision pipelines.
• Develop prompt engineering strategies and retrieval-augmented systems (RAG).
• Evaluate, integrate, and maintain AI/ML models in production.
• Develop and maintain Python REST API backends and data models/storage for large-scale catalogs.
• Partner with engineers, scientists, and quality leads to translate workflows into backend services.
• Drive reliability, performance, and observability of services; contribute to design, code reviews, and cross-team planning.

Skills

Python

REST APIs

Distributed systems

Async processing

AI model hosting

Team collaboration

Backend services

Education

BS in Computer Science

Tools

Kubernetes

Elasticsearch

Redis

pgvector

Job description

Apple is seeking a versatile Backend Software Engineer to design, build, and own backend infrastructure for imaging engineering and quality workflows across Camera, Photos, and Image Quality. You will develop and operate Python REST APIs, data models for massive image and metadata catalogs, and run long‑running asynchronous jobs.

The ideal candidate has strong distributed systems knowledge, experience hosting AI/ML models, and a track record of delivering reliable production services at scale.