Senior Platform Software Engineer

Apple Inc.; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 142,000 - 263,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Apple stock program

Comprehensive medical and dental

Retirement benefits

Discounted products

Tuition reimbursement

Job summary

Apple Inc. is seeking a Senior Platform Software Engineer for DEP in Seattle. You will build end-to-end systems including API, service, schema, configuration, pipeline, and telemetry.

You’ll shape deployment patterns, drive reliability, and enhance the developer experience with tools, docs, and onboarding. Requirements include 6+ years in building backend services and distributed systems, API design experience, CI/CD expertise, and strong relational database knowledge.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience.
• 6+ years of software engineering experience with backend services and distributed systems.
• Strong programming fundamentals and shipping production backend services.
• Experience designing durable APIs, schemas, or developer-facing interfaces.
• Experience with CI/CD and release engineering, including safe rollback.
• Strong relational database fundamentals with schema design and migrations.
• Experience operating production services with observability and on-call.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the Go services at the heart of DEP, and shape APIs for deployment and lifecycle.
• Define patterns for deployment, configuration, release, and lifecycle for platform services.
• Drive operational excellence with SLAs, observability, release safety, and reliability as adoption grows.
• Shape the developer experience across CLI tooling, scaffolding, APIs, and docs; onboard teams and reduce friction.
• Design and evolve core data and persistence models with durable schemas and migration patterns.
• Develop reusable AI-assisted engineering workflows and patterns for skills and agents.
• Set engineering standards, evaluate new tech, mentor engineers, and collaborate with customers.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

CI/CD

API design

Observability

Developer tooling

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in CS/Engineering

Tools

Terraform/OpenTofu

PostgreSQL

OpenTelemetry

CLI tooling

Open Policy Agent / Rego

Job description

Seattle, Washington, United States Software and Services

People at Apple don't just build products. They craft the kind of experience that has revolutionized entire industries. The diverse collection of our people and their ideas inspire innovation in everything we do. Imagine what you could do here! Join Apple, and help us leave the world better than we found it.Core Data and Intelligence (CDI) is the central data, AI, and machine learning engineering team in ASE Media. We build the primitives other teams rely on: privacy-compliant data collection, canonical datasets, AI and machine learning building blocks, and the visualizations that turn them into decisions. That work shows up across Apple. It is a signal for Music recommendations, a report on the engagement of a new TV+ feature, and the Average Revenue Per User we share with developers. We partner with client and server teams to source data and ensure collection meets Apple's high privacy standards. CDI also leads privacy engineering within ASE. Apple Services Engineering powers App Store, Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Apple Books, Fitness+, the iTunes Store, and more.The Data Engineering Platform (DEP) is how CDI does that work at scale. DEP builds an opinionated data engineering ecosystem that accelerates data and machine learning engineers. It includes spec-driven development, data quality, AI-driven workflows, cloud portability, CI/CD, integrated privacy and compliance, and scaled operational tooling.We are looking for a Senior Platform Software Engineer to build and evolve the foundations of DEP. You will work across the full depth of the stack, from the command an engineer types to the infrastructure running in production. You will build foundational developer and platform systems, take direct responsibility for critical production services, and establish engineering patterns that scale across DEP.

Description

As a Senior Platform Software Engineer on DEP, you will build systems end to end: the API, the service, the schema, the configuration, the pipeline, and the telemetry.

• Design, build, and operate the Go services at the heart of DEP, and shape the declarative APIs and interfaces engineers build against
• Define how services ship on the platform, establishing patterns and abstractions for deployment, configuration, release, and lifecycle that services and partner teams can build on
• Drive operational excellence for critical production services, including service-level objectives, observability and alerting, release safety, availability, and recovery as adoption grows
• Shape the developer experience across command-line tooling, project scaffolding, APIs, and documentation. Run onboarding, gather feedback from data engineering teams, and turn recurring friction into product improvements
• Design and evolve core data and persistence models, establishing durable schemas, contracts, and interfaces with clear patterns for compatibility, migration, and evolution
• Develop reusable AI-assisted engineering workflows and establish patterns for how skills and agents are built, evaluated, shared, and maintained across the team
• Shape technical direction by defining engineering standards, evaluating emerging technology, mentoring engineers, and building strong relationships with engineering teams and customers to inform priorities and investments

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience
• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building complex backend services and distributed systems
• Strong programming fundamentals, with a track record of shipping and operating production backend services and developer-facing tools
• Experience designing durable APIs, schemas, or developer-facing interfaces with attention to compatibility and evolution
• Demonstrated experience with CI/CD and release engineering, including promotion between environments and safe rollback
• Strong relational database fundamentals, including schema design, indexing, transactions and isolation levels, and managed schema migrations in production services
• Solid distributed systems fundamentals, including the ability to reason about reliability, consistency, failure modes, and operational tradeoffs
• Experience operating production services, including observability, on-call, incident response, and post-incident improvement, with a track record of raising the reliability and maintainability of systems you inherit
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to work effectively across teams and communicate technical decisions clearly

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building infrastructure, developer platforms, or developer-facing systems
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code systems such as Terraform or OpenTofu, including building reusable abstractions or operating infrastructure tooling at scale
• Experience with policy-as-code or configuration-as-code technologies such as Open Policy Agent, Rego, PKL, CUE, Jsonnet, or comparable systems
• Experience building CLI or terminal-based developer tools used as part of engineers' daily workflows
• Experience with observability technologies such as OpenTelemetry, including instrumentation, dashboards, alerting, and service-level indicators
• Hands-on depth with relational database systems such as PostgreSQL or CockroachDB
• Experience with artifact or package distribution systems, including concepts such as versioning, immutability, provenance, signing, or registry protocols
• Experience developing reusable skills, agents, or workflows for AI-assisted development tools and helping drive their adoption across an engineering team
• Exposure to data governance, privacy engineering, security, or compliance-driven requirements, and experience partnering with privacy and security teams
• Experience serving other engineering teams, with an understanding of multi-tenancy, blast radius, shared ownership models, compatibility, and deprecation
• Strong developer empathy, with a track record of engaging engineering customers through onboarding, documentation, office hours, and other feedback channels

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 $142,300 and $263,300, 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. Learn more about Apple Benefits

Note: Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

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. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant

At Apple, we believe accessibility is a fundamental human right. You’ll find that idea reflected in everything here - in our culture, our benefits and our digital tools. By welcoming as many perspectives as possible, we help you build a career where you feel like you belong.

Learn about accessibility in Apple’s workplace

Learn about reasonable accommodations for job applicants

Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.