Payment Systems Architect: Reliability & Scale

Apple Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 216,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical and dental coverage

Employee stock programs

Relocation assistance

Tuition reimbursement

Job summary

Apple Pay seeks an Architect to set the technical direction for reliability, scalability, and availability of Apple Pay's distributed systems at global scale. You will define metrics, SLOs, incident postmortems, and guide teams across client, server, and devops to ensure architecture decisions reflect real-world operations.

You will review designs for resilience, write prototypes, lead incident reviews, and mentor engineers on distributed systems fundamentals such as replication, partitioning,

Qualifications

• Proven track record designing and operating distributed systems at scale in high-throughput, low-latency production environments.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals: replication, partitioning, consensus, and failure handling across partitions.
• Hands‑on experience defining and instrumenting metrics for availability and scalability (SLOs, error budgets, tracing).
• Experience with scalable system building blocks: load balancing, caching, messaging/streams, database sharding, service mesh.

Responsibilities

• Guide the evolution of Apple Pay's distributed systems with a clear point of view on trade-offs appropriate to payment-critical infrastructure.
• Define and drive reliability engineering practices across the org: SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, capacity planning, failure-mode analysis.
• Establish observability and metrics strategy for latency, traffic, errors, tracing, and alerting.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to review designs for scalability bottlenecks and resilience gaps.
• Write code and prototypes to validate architectural decisions and unblock teams.
• Lead incident reviews and postmortems to drive systemic fixes, not patches.
• Mentor engineers on distributed systems fundamentals and trade-offs.

Skills

Distributed systems

Reliability engineering

Metrics & SLOs

Multi-region design

Incident reviews

Cross-team communication

Tools

Load balancing

Caching

Service mesh

Tracing

Job description

Apple Pay seeks an Architect to set the technical direction for reliability, scalability, and availability of Apple Pay's distributed systems at global scale. You will define metrics, SLOs, incident postmortems, and guide teams across client, server, and devops to ensure architecture decisions reflect real-world operations.

You will review designs for resilience, write prototypes, lead incident reviews, and mentor engineers on distributed systems fundamentals such as replication, partitioning,