Senior Real-Time Ad-Serving Backend Engineer

Apple Inc.; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple Ads Engineering is seeking a senior backend engineer to design, develop, and operate real-time ad-serving systems at Apple scale. You will build low-latency, distributed services in a cloud environment and collaborate across indexing, search, and program management to deliver high-quality solutions.

You will work with Go/Java/Rust/C++/Scala and modern data platforms, applying ML/NLP concepts and ensuring privacy, reliability, and observability in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of industry experience architecting and developing internet-scale server software for Linux systems, including scalable micro-services or data-driven platforms.
• Strong background in computer science fundamentals, including algorithms and data structures.
• Strong coding skills in Go, Java, Rust, C++, Scala, or a similar OOP/Functional language.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating scalable micro-services.
• Experience with search technologies such as Lucene, Solr, or Elasticsearch. Expertise with NoSQL datastores (e.g., Cassandra).
• Proficiency with data processing technologies (e.g., Kafka, Spark, Flink) and methods for processing petabyte-scale datasets.
• Experience with AWS services such as Amazon S3, EC2, and EKS/Kubernetes. Strong problem-solving and debugging skills.
• Demonstrated ability to work on complex problems and systems, alone or as part of a team, to deliver complete systems end to end.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work effectively with technical and non-technical cross-functional teams, including operations and project management partners.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and implement internet-scale, low-latency, highly-available ad-serving systems in a cloud environment.
• Build performant micro-services and distributed data platforms that support high data volumes and QPS.
• Engineer secure, scalable distributed data processing pipelines capable of processing petabyte-scale datasets for indexing and retrieval.
• Apply techniques from algorithmic search, machine learning, natural language processing, and AI to advance candidate retrieval and ranking.
• Collaborate with multiple internal teams to support indexing and searching use cases across the organization.
• Partner with product managers, operations, SREs, and fellow engineers to define requirements and deliver end-to-end systems.
• Work effectively both independently and as part of a team to deliver complete systems from design through production.
• Write clean, efficient, well-documented code and participates in code reviews.
• Debug and resolve complex issues across large-scale distributed systems.
• Mentor other engineers and contribute to engineering best practices.
• Stay current with advances in search, retrieval, distributed systems, ML/AI, and cloud infrastructure, and contribute ideas that improve the platform.

Skills

Go

Java

Rust

C++

Scala

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Elasticsearch

Solr

Lucene

Kafka

Spark

Flink

Kubernetes

Amazon S3

EC2

Job description

Apple Ads Engineering is seeking a senior backend engineer to design, develop, and operate real-time ad-serving systems at Apple scale. You will build low-latency, distributed services in a cloud environment and collaborate across indexing, search, and program management to deliver high-quality solutions.

You will work with Go/Java/Rust/C++/Scala and modern data platforms, applying ML/NLP concepts and ensuring privacy, reliability, and observability in a fast-paced environment.