Senior Backend Engineer — Global Gift & Payments

Apple; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple in San Diego is seeking a senior backend engineer for the Gift Card payments platform. You will design and build distributed systems that process high-volume transactions securely and reliably across Apple’s ecosystem.

The role covers architecture, deployment, observability, and on-call operations, with collaboration across engineering, design, and product teams to deliver scalable software.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of professional backend software engineering experience.
• Experience architecting, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems at large scale.
• Ability to reason about distributed systems trade-offs and defend choices.
• Commitment to engineering excellence and learning new technologies.
• Strong written and verbal communication for global teams and partners.
• Track record of influencing technical direction and relationships.
• Experience using generative AI tools in the development lifecycle.
• Ability to collaborate with cross-functional partners to define product objectives.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services powering Apple Gift Card experiences.
• Architect secure, high-performance APIs and services handling millions of transactions globally.
• Own systems end to end from design through deployment, monitoring, and on-call.
• Deploy and operate services on Apple’s internal cloud with CI/CD pipelines and IaC.
• Collaborate with teams across Apple to integrate with core financial and commerce systems.
• Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting for production reliability.
• Participate in code reviews and design discussions to raise the technical bar.
• Lead complex projects from conception to production and drive technical consensus.
• Continuously improve performance, developer experience, and operational excellence.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

APIs design

Code reviews

Communication

AI tooling awareness

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or SE

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Spring

Java/Kotlin

REST

gRPC

CI/CD

OpenTelemetry

Datadog

Prometheus

SQL/NoSQL

Job description

Apple in San Diego is seeking a senior backend engineer for the Gift Card payments platform. You will design and build distributed systems that process high-volume transactions securely and reliably across Apple’s ecosystem.

The role covers architecture, deployment, observability, and on-call operations, with collaboration across engineering, design, and product teams to deliver scalable software.