Senior Software Engineer - Platform Apps & Technologies

Socket.dev; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Socket.dev, Cupertino, CA, is seeking a backend engineer to own and grow the service behind our marketplace and plugin ecosystem. You’ll shape the catalog API, plugin hosting pipelines, and the trust model that keeps every install safe and scalable.

You’ll design distributed backend systems, apply ML/data engineering ideas, and partner with security reviewers. The role emphasizes production readiness, uptime, and end-to-end ownership in a dynamic environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years industry experience as a Software Engineer working on deploying large-scale systems.
• Strong understanding in data centric systems, distributed systems, reliability, and cloud services.
• Hands-on experience in designing and coding large scale systems.
• Proven experience with applied machine learning, data engineering, or similar.
• Bachelor in Computer Science or related experience
• MS in Computer Science or related experience (preferred)

Responsibilities

• Own and grow the backend service behind the marketplace and plugin ecosystem.
• Design schema for catalog of plugins/servers/endorsements and manage hosting pipelines.
• Hardening services for production, ensuring uptime, safe staging/prod rollouts, and caching decisions.
• Collaborate with client-side harnesses and security reviewers to keep catalog safe.
• Work on end-to-end service ownership in a rapidly evolving problem space.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud services

Large-scale systems

Machine learning

Data engineering

Software engineering

Education

Bachelor in Computer Science

MS in Computer Science

Job description

Our team builds the platform Apple's engineers use to work with AI agents: the coding agents themselves, the registry and marketplace that distributes the tools and extensions they run, and the sandboxing, identity, and supply-chain controls that make it safe to give an agent real access. We work closely with frontier labs and the teams that run Apple's model-serving infrastructure to bring the best models into engineers' hands quickly and safely. Our customers are Apple's own developers, MLEs, and data scientists — the people building the products Apple customers love. We're a small team with unusually wide surface area. In a given month you might harden a CLI that ships to thousands of engineers, isolate an agent inside a VM, design the trust model for a plugin ecosystem, or make a new model available across every harness we support. We ship on short cycles and we live on everything we build. Our systems have to scale, stay highly available, and "just work." That's a tall order, and we're looking for talented and passionate engineers who love dealing with such challenges.

Description

We're looking for a backend engineer to own and grow the service behind our marketplace and plugin ecosystem — the system that lets Apple's engineers discover, install, and trust the MCP servers, plugins, and skills that extend their agents. This is the registry, the API, and the database that every harness we ship reads from.You'll work across the full backend surface: schema design for a growing catalog of plugins/servers/endorsements, the content hosting and pipelines that ingest plugin source, auth, and the supply-chain checks that keep a plugin marketplace from becoming an attack vector. You'll also help harden the service itself for production: real uptime expectations, safe staging/prod rollouts, and the kind of database and caching decisions that hold up as the catalog and install volume grow. You'll be successful here if you enjoy owning a service end to end and if you like working close to a genuinely new problem space (agent/plugin distribution) where the right abstractions aren't settled yet. You'll collaborate closely with the engineers building the client-side harnesses that consume this API, and with the security-minded reviewers who keep the catalog safe.

Minimum Qualifications

5+ years industry experience as a Software Engineer working on deploying large-scale systemsStrong understanding in data centric systems, distributed systems, reliability, and cloud servicesHands-on experience in designing and coding large scale systemsProven experience with applied machine learning, data engineering, or similarBachelor in Computer Science or related experience

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with developer tools or developer productivity systemsExperience with open source or inner sourceMS in Computer Science or related experience