Backend Engineer - AI-Powered Imaging Tools

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical and dental coverage

Retirement benefits

Stock programs and product discounts

Job summary

Apple Inc. 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, building and operating Python REST API services and data models for large-scale image metadata catalogs.

The role involves running long-running asynchronous jobs, model-serving infrastructure, and collaborating with partner teams to translate workflows into reliable backend services with strong focus

Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience shipping production backend systems.
• 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 (LLMs, vision models, or similar) in production.
• Working knowledge of asynchronous job execution patterns for long-running computations, and experience scaling these systems under load.
• Solid understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals: consistency, coordination, failure handling, and tradeoffs between them.
• 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, agentic workflows, and vision pipelines, including hosting, versioning, monitoring, and cost/latency/accuracy tradeoffs across the service lifecycle, not just calling hosted third-party APIs.
• Develop prompt engineering strategies and retrieval-augmented systems and the underlying vector storage/retrieval infrastructure that make internal image and metadata corpora accessible and actionable to partner teams.
• Evaluate, integrate, and maintain AI/ML models in production: monitoring for quality regression, managing model versions, and balancing cost, latency, and accuracy tradeoffs across the service lifecycle.
• Develop and maintain Python REST API backends and data models/storage for large-scale image, video, and metadata catalogs, including endpoints that kick off, monitor, and scale long-running asynchronous jobs.
• Partner with engineers, scientists, and quality leads across Camera, Photos, and Image Quality to translate their workflows into reliable backend services.
• Drive the reliability, performance, and observability of services other teams depend on; contribute to technical design, code review, and cross-team planning.

Job description

Apple Inc. 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, building and operating Python REST API services and data models for large-scale image metadata catalogs.

The role involves running long-running asynchronous jobs, model-serving infrastructure, and collaborating with partner teams to translate workflows into reliable backend services with strong focus