Distinguished Engineer, Infrastructure Engineering, Wallet, Payments & Commerce

Apple Inc.; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 257,400 - 386,300; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive medical and dental coverage

Retirement benefits

Employee stock purchase program

Tuition reimbursement for formal education

Job summary

Apple Inc. in Cupertino, California is looking for a Distinguished Engineer to drive the technical vision for critical infrastructure across cloud services. This role requires expertise in managing large-scale distributed systems and cloud-native architecture, ensuring the integrity and reliability of financial data operations.

The professional will be tasked with architecting resilient systems, defining standards, and leading cross-functional collaboration for innovation in financial services. Apple offers a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and stock purchase options.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of expertise across infrastructure engineering, including distributed data systems.
• Proven experience designing large-scale distributed systems serving millions of users.
• Experience defining SLO and SLA frameworks for mission-critical systems.

Responsibilities

• Define and govern WPC's data platforms, setting standards for integrity and recovery.
• Design infrastructure across AWS and establish patterns for resilience and security.
• Champion chaos engineering and define measurable health indicators for systems.

Skills

Infrastructure Engineering

Cloud-native Architecture

Traffic Management

Communication Skills

Distributed Data Systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Tools

AWS

Job description

Cupertino, California, United States Software and Services

We are seeking a Distinguished Engineer to define and lead the technical vision for WPC's core infrastructure across three deeply connected domains: data services, cloud engineering, and traffic engineering. This is a platform-defining technical authority role responsible for the systems that store financial data with integrity, run securely and elastically across cloud and hybrid environments, and route every request reliably at global scale. This is not an operations management role. It is a first-principles engineering leadership role reporting to the head of Infrastructure Engineering.

Description

As a Distinguished Engineer for Infrastructure, you will define how Apple's financial services are stored, served, scaled, and routed. You will influence architecture before code is written, set the standards that govern data durability and request integrity, and shape how WPC consumes cloud and edge capacity worldwide.

Responsibilities

• Define and govern WPC's transactional and analytical data platforms, setting standards for integrity, consistency, replication, backup/recovery, and lifecycle management to meet financial and regulatory requirements.
• Architect WPC's cloud-native and hybrid infrastructure across AWS and comparable platforms, establishing patterns for resilience, scalability, cost-efficiency, and security while leading large-scale modernization initiatives.
• Design global traffic management architecture, including load balancing, routing, and failover, and define capacity, rate limiting, and resilience strategies to maintain payment availability under peak and adverse conditions.
• Champion chaos engineering, disaster recovery, and design-time reliability practices, and define SLO/SLA standards and error budgets for financial-grade infrastructure.
• Set end-to-end observability standards across the infrastructure stack and define measurable health indicators and engineering scorecards.
• Serve as the senior technical authority for infrastructure, driving alignment across engineering teams, identifying opportunities to leverage Apple-wide capabilities, and mentoring Principal and Senior Engineers.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of deep expertise across infrastructure engineering, including distributed data systems, cloud-native architecture, and traffic or networking systems at massive scale.
• Proven experience designing and evolving large-scale distributed systems serving millions of users or high-volume transactions.
• Strong foundation in cloud-native and hybrid architectures designed for scalability and resilience, with hands‑on experience on AWS or comparable platforms.
• Demonstrated expertise in data platforms, including consistency, durability, replication, and recovery for systems where correctness is critical.
• Experience designing traffic management, load balancing, routing, or edge delivery for high‑availability, multi‑region systems.
• Experience defining SLO and SLA frameworks and resilience strategies for mission‑critical systems.
• Track record of technical leadership, driving alignment and architectural direction across large, complex organizations.
• Experience working with or building regulated or high‑trust systems and understanding compliance implications.
• Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts to executive and engineering audiences alike.
• Demonstrated success mentoring and elevating technical talent across global teams.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience across engineering including distributed data systems, cloud-native architecture, and traffic or networking systems at massive scale. Experience in payment systems, money movement, tokenization, or high volume transaction processing.
• Experience operating active‑active or multi‑region failover architectures for financial or high‑trust workloads.
• Background in service mesh, API gateways, CDN, or edge infrastructure at global scale.
• Experience with streaming data platforms, change data capture, or large‑scale data reconciliation.
• Familiarity with compliance‑driven infrastructure design in financial ecosystems.
• Experience evolving engineering culture toward measurable reliability, performance, and cost ownership.
• Experience building or evolving shared infrastructure platforms that serve multiple products or business units.

At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $257,400 and $386,300, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.

Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs. Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan. You’ll also receive benefits including: Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation.

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics.

Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.