Senior Platform Software Engineer

Apple; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple's Data Engineering Platform (DEP) team seeks a Senior Platform Software Engineer to own core platform systems end-to-end, including APIs, services, schemas, configurations, pipelines, and telemetry. You will blend hands-on coding with platform-wide thinking to shape the technical direction the platform follows.

You will design and operate core Go services, manage versioning and immutability, define deployment contracts and Kubernetes topology, and drive operational excellence for critical

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's Degree in CS, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, focusing on platform, infrastructure, or developer-facing systems.
• Strong Go, shipping, and operating production backend services and CLI tools.
• Deep Kubernetes experience: Helm, environment layering, probes, scaling, policies.
• CI/CD pipelines ownership including promotions and automated rollback.
• Solid relational databases fundamentals and migrations in services you operate.
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals and Go concurrency.
• Experience owning production services, on-call, telemetry, and incident follow-through.
• Experience authoring reusable AI-assisted development tools like Claude Code or Copilot.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the Go services at the heart of the platform, and shape the declarative interface engineers build against.
• Own versioning and immutability as a platform concern - artifact publication, signing, semantic versioning, and dependency pinning.
• Define how services ship on the platform: deployment contract, environment promotion, and Kubernetes topology for platform services and partners.
• Drive operational excellence for a foundational P1 service: SLOs, trusted alerting, release provenance, and availability/rollback posture as adoption grows.
• Own the developer experience: CLI, scaffolding, APIs, and docs; run onboarding and gather feedback for improvements.
• Set technical direction: define engineering standards, mentor engineers, and scale AI-assisted development practices.

Skills

Go

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Distributed systems

Database fundamentals

Production ownership

AI-assisted development tools

Incident response

CLI tooling

Education

Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

Terraform/OpenTofu

OpenTelemetry

PostgreSQL

CockroachDB

Helm

Job description

Summary

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 own the primitives other teams build 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 to 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.

Description

As a Senior Platform Software Engineer on DEP, you will own platform systems end to end - the API, the service, the schema, the configuration, the pipeline, and the telemetry. You will combine hands-on engineering with platform-wide thinking, and help set the technical direction the platform follows.

• Design, build, and operate the Go services at the heart of the platform, and shape the declarative interface engineers build against
• Own versioning and immutability as a first-class platform concern - immutable artifact publication, signing, semantic versioning across independently released components, and dependency pinning that holds from producer to consumer
• Define how services ship on the platform: the deployment contract, the environment promotion model, and the Kubernetes topology that platform services and partner teams inherit
• Drive operational excellence for a foundational P1 service: service level objectives, alerting that engineers trust, release provenance, and the availability and rollback posture of services as adoption grows
• Own the developer experience - the command-line tool engineers use daily, project scaffolding, APIs, and documentation. Run onboarding, gather feedback from data engineering teams, and turn recurring questions into product improvements
• Set technical direction: define the engineering standards adopted across CDI, an organization of roughly 550 engineers, evaluate emerging technology, mentor engineers, and help scale AI-assisted development practices across the team

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent building platform, infrastructure, or developer-facing systemsStrong Go, with a track record of shipping and operating production backend services and command-line toolsDeep hands-on Kubernetes experience: Helm, per-environment configuration layering, probes, resource and replica strategy, rolling updates, and network policyDemonstrated ownership of CI/CD pipelines and release engineering, including promotion between environments and automated rollbackStrong relational database fundamentals: schema design, indexing, transactions and isolation levels, and managed migrations in a service you operatedSolid distributed systems fundamentals, and hands-on concurrency in GoExperience owning services in production, not only building them: on-call, incident response, telemetry, and post-incident follow-through, including taking on an established production system, building deep understanding of it quickly, and raising its operational and documentation standardsDemonstrated ability to author reusable skills or agents for AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code or Copilot, adopted by other engineers, and interest in scaling these practices across a team

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with Terraform or OpenTofu beyond consumption - writing providers, managing state backends, or operating a registry, including the HashiCorp provider or module registry protocols, or any artifact registry where immutability and signing are enforcedPolicy-as-code and configuration-as-code experience: Open Policy Agent and Rego applied to infrastructure change gating, and PKL, CUE, Jsonnet, or a comparable typed configuration languagePractical command of versioning and immutability in a real system: semantic versioning across independently released components, artifact promotion, dependency pinning, and reproducible buildsExperience building CLI or terminal-UI developer tools that a large engineering population depends on dailyOpenTelemetry instrumentation, and building dashboards and alerts that engineers trustWorking knowledge of mTLS-based workload identity, certificate rotation, and secret management systemsHands-on depth in PostgreSQL or CockroachDBExposure to data governance, privacy engineering, or compliance-driven requirements on a platform, and comfort working with privacy and security partnersExperience as a platform team serving other engineering teams: multi-tenancy, blast radius, shared ownership models, and deprecation, with strong written communication and a track record of developer engagement through onboarding, documentation, and office hours