Senior Data Engineer, AI-Powered Data Platforms

Apple Inc.; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 185,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

RSU awards

Employee stock purchase plan

Relocation assistance

Medical and dental coverage

Job summary

Apple in Cupertino is seeking a Data Engineer for Apple Ads to build, operate, and optimize near-real-time and batch data pipelines. You will ship features and backfills, ensure privacy, and own pipeline components, collaborating with engineers and product managers in a fast-paced, AI-enabled environment.

We expect 5+ years in data engineering, proficiency in Spark/Kafka/Flink, and strong CS fundamentals. The role emphasizes reliability, scalability, and continuous improvement, with

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building distributed, scalable data pipelines.
• Proven track record of successful and timely software delivery with complex dependencies.
• Strong computer science and data-engineering fundamentals.
• Proficiency with Scala, Java, or Python and ease with picking up new technologies.
• Proficiency in distributed data processing technologies (Spark, Kafka, Flink) and data modeling with Iceberg lakehouse concepts.
• Experience building and scaling systems on premise and in the cloud.
• Demonstrated productive use of AI coding tools in real delivery.
• Passion for data quality, code elegance, clear documentation, cost saving, and operational excellence.

Responsibilities

• Engineer and operate secure, scalable data processing systems across real-time, near-real-time, and batch execution contexts using Spark, Kafka, and Iceberg.
• Deliver features, schema changes, backfills, and fixes with clean, well-tested, well-documented code, and help support privacy-preserving critical pipelines.
• Depending on level, own the design of pipeline components, define and refactor approaches to meet correctness and scale challenges.
• Use AI coding agents to accelerate implementation, test coverage, and debugging, validating every result for correctness, privacy, and cost.
• Apply a strong understanding of the intersection between business, analytics, and engineering, taking a proactive approach focused on reusable solutions to improve efficiency and time to insight.
• Contribute to on-call, monitoring, and the continuous improvement of pipeline reliability and efficiency; more senior engineers help lead incident response and root-cause analysis.
• Collaborate with a team of world-class data engineers and product managers; grow through code and design reviews, and mentor other engineers as you gain seniority.
• Work effectively in a rapidly changing, sprint-based, agile environment, and contribute to a culture that emphasizes reliability, resiliency, extensibility, scalability, and productivity.

Skills

Distributed data pipelines

Programming languages (Scala/Java/Py)

Spark

Kafka

Flink

Iceberg lakehouse

AI coding tools

Cloud & on-prem deployments

Tools

Spark

Kafka

Flink

Iceberg

Job description

Apple in Cupertino is seeking a Data Engineer for Apple Ads to build, operate, and optimize near-real-time and batch data pipelines. You will ship features and backfills, ensure privacy, and own pipeline components, collaborating with engineers and product managers in a fast-paced, AI-enabled environment.

We expect 5+ years in data engineering, proficiency in Spark/Kafka/Flink, and strong CS fundamentals. The role emphasizes reliability, scalability, and continuous improvement, with