Senior Software Engineer, Apple Card & Savings

Apple Inc.; Cary (NC); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple Inc. in Cary, North Carolina, seeks a Senior Software Engineer for Apple Card & Savings. You will design, build, test, deliver, and operate distributed backend services powering Apple Card features, with on-call responsibility and a DevOps mindset. You will own end-to-end features, review code, and mentor teammates in a highly regulated environment.

You’ll work with Kotlin/Java, Docker/Kubernetes, and cloud platforms to ensure reliability and compliance while shipping changes safely.

Qualifications

• Solid experience building and operating production distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including idempotency, retries, timeouts, and consistency trade-offs.
• Proficiency in a modern backend programming language (e.g. Kotlin, Java).
• Experience debugging production issues using logs, metrics, and traces, and following through on fixes and post-incident improvements.
• A testing-first mindset: experience writing thorough unit and integration tests as a natural part of development, and designing code with testability in mind.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including explaining technical issues to non-engineering stakeholders and external partners.
• No formal degree is required. What matters most is your mindset, your initiative, and your demonstrated ability to apply advanced skills to real-world applications.
• Experience using generative AI tools throughout the software development lifecycle to produce high-quality software.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, test, and operate distributed backend services powering Apple Card and Savings features at scale.
• Ship changes safely through automated pipelines and controlled rollout strategies including canary deployments and feature flags.
• Own on-call reliability for your services, lead incident response end to end, and drive post-incident reviews that produce lasting remediation.
• Own the reliability and correctness of integrations with financial institution partners and payment networks, including defining SLOs and leading remediation when those targets are breached.
• Own features end to end from specification and technical design through production operation.
• Review code and contribute to technical design discussions, raising the quality bar across the team.
• Write thorough unit and integration tests and design code with testability as a first-class concern.
• Automate operational toil to improve reliability and reduce manual intervention.
• Author clear technical documentation for services, APIs, and operational runbooks.
• Mentor and onboard new teammates, sharing knowledge and best practices.

Skills

Kotlin

Java

Distributed systems

DevOps

On-call reliability

Communication

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Datadog

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Job description

Senior Software Engineer, Apple Card & Savings

Cary, North Carolina, United States Software and Services

The Apple Card & Savings team is building the financial products that put users in control of their money. We built Apple Card to reinvent how credit cards work, and we continue to launch groundbreaking features used by millions of people every day. We are looking for an experienced engineer who loves owning critical services end to end, takes pride in operational excellence, and thrives in a highly regulated environment where correctness, reliability, and compliance requirements shape every technical decision.

Description

You’ll design, build, test, deliver, and operate the distributed services that power Apple Card and Savings — from applications, accounts, and transactions to payments, savings transfers, rewards, and customer notifications. You’ll be given the support of a talented team, access to modern technologies, and the autonomy to take full ownership of your work. Our team operates as DevOps: we build what we run. You’ll be hands‑on in every phase of the lifecycle — shipping changes safely through automated pipelines and controlled rollouts, participating in an on‑call rotation, joining incident response and post‑incident reviews, and automating away operational toil. You’ll build reliable integrations with financial institution and payment network partners and with other Apple services such as Wallet, Apple Cash, and iCloud. As an experienced member of the team, you’ll own features from specification through production, review code, contribute to technical design, write clear documentation, and help onboard and mentor teammates. Success in this role requires self‑motivation, clear communication, a collaborative approach, and a commitment to engineering excellence and continuous improvement.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, test, and operate distributed backend services powering Apple Card and Savings features at scale
• Ship changes safely through automated pipelines and controlled rollout strategies including canary deployments and feature flags
• Own on‑call reliability for your services, lead incident response end to end, and drive post‑incident reviews that produce lasting remediation rather than one‑time fixes
• Own the reliability and correctness of integrations with financial institution partners and payment networks, including defining SLOs and leading remediation when those targets are breached
• Own features end to end from specification and technical design through production operation
• Review code and contribute to technical design discussions, raising the quality bar across the team
• Write thorough unit and integration tests and design code with testability as a first‑class concern
• Automate operational toil to improve reliability and reduce manual intervention
• Author clear technical documentation for services, APIs, and operational runbooks
• Mentor and onboard new teammates, sharing knowledge and best practices

Minimum Qualifications

• Solid experience building and operating production distributed systems, including services you have supported on call.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including idempotency, retries, timeouts, and consistency trade‑offs.
• Proficiency in a modern backend programming language (e.g. Kotlin, Java).
• Experience debugging production issues using logs, metrics, and traces, and following through on fixes and post‑incident improvements.
• A testing‑first mindset: experience writing thorough unit and integration tests as a natural part of development, and designing code with testability in mind.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including explaining technical issues to non‑engineering stakeholders and external partners.
• No formal degree is required. What matters most is your mindset, your initiative, and your demonstrated ability to apply advanced skills to real‑world applications.
• Experience using generative AI tools throughout the software development lifecycle to produce high‑quality software.

Preferred Qualifications

• Production experience with Kotlin and Spring at high transaction volumes, including tuning JVM performance, managing connection pools, and maintaining API contracts across multiple concurrent client versions.
• Experience in payments, banking, or other regulated financial domains, including data correctness (reconciliation, audit trails) and working within compliance, consumer‑protection, and privacy requirements.
• Experience with containerized, cloud‑native services (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, AWS), including multi‑region resilience and failover.
• Experience with CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and safe release practices (e.g. canary deployments, feature flags, automated rollback).
• Experience with observability tools (e.g. Datadog, Splunk, OpenTelemetry), service level objectives (SLOs), and building actionable alerts that detect issues before customers or partners do.
• Experience with event‑driven architectures and messaging (e.g. Kafka or equivalent event streaming) and with SQL/NoSQL databases at scale (e.g. Aurora, DynamoDB).
• Understanding of security and privacy fundamentals for protecting sensitive customer and financial data (e.g. mTLS, PKI and certificate lifecycle management, JWT).

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