Senior Software Platform Engineer, Apple Pay

Socket.dev; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Socket.dev is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to help build and operate the internal developer platform used by Wallet, Payments and Commerce teams. You will design APIs, implement production-grade services, and own performance and correctness of distributed systems that engineers rely on daily.

You will collaborate across squads, apply strong Go/Java/C++ skills, and contribute to telemetry, reliability, and security practices in a fast-moving, privacy-conscious environment.

Qualifications

• 6+ years building and operating production backend or infrastructure systems.
• Strong programming ability in Go, or Java, Kotlin, C++, with API design and concurrency basics.
• A real testing practice; you write tests that catch regressions.
• Distributed systems experience covering idempotency, eventual consistency, retries and partial failures.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes and cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Excellent written and verbal communication; documentation of designs and incidents.

Responsibilities

• Design APIs and write production-grade code for the platform.
• Own performance and correctness of critical services used by engineering teams.
• Collaborate with multiple squads to evolve platform capabilities.
• Document designs and incident responses for cross-team use.

Skills

Go

Java/Kotlin/C++

API design

Concurrency

Error handling

Testing

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Cloud providers

Communication

Tools

Terraform

Helm

Jsonnet

Job description

We build and operate the internal developer platform used by every engineering team in the Wallet, Payments and Commerce organization. The platform covers the full software development lifecycle, from scaffolding a new service through building and releasing it, provisioning the cloud infrastructure and data stores it depends on, deploying it across multiple regions, and giving teams the observability and operational tooling they need to run it in production. As demand for these services grows, we are expanding the team that builds the platform beneath them. We work under strict privacy, security and compliance requirements, and we hold a high bar for engineering quality. The platform exists so teams can build and ship new products faster and more reliably than they could on their own.

Description

This is a software engineering role on the team that builds the platform itself. The primary output is design and code. You will design the APIs, write the production code behind them, and own the performance and correctness of systems that engineering teams across the organization depend on daily.

Minimum Qualifications

• 6+ years building and operating production backend or infrastructure systems.
• Strong programming ability in Go, or in Java, Kotlin, C++ or a comparable statically typed language, with solid fundamentals in API design, concurrency and error handling.
• A real testing practice.
• You write tests that would catch a regression rather than tests that restate the implementation.
• Distributed systems experience covering idempotency, eventual consistency, retries and partial failure, plus practical performance work where you profiled something and measured the fix.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes and extensive cloud experience with at least one of the major cloud providers.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including design documents and incident write-ups that other engineers can act on.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience writing Kubernetes controllers or operators in production, including custom resource design and schema versioning.
• Experience with declarative configuration and templating systems such as Pkl, CUE, Jsonnet, Kustomize or Helm, or with infrastructure as code such as Terraform.
• Extended experience in at least one of: GitOps and progressive delivery, developer platforms and internal tooling, multi-region and disaster recovery, observability, or regulated environments such as PCI.
• Fluency with coding agents and LLM-based development tooling, and judgment about when to trust their output.
• Ability to coach and mentor other ICs, and to lead a design review to a decision.