Systems Architect - Apple Pay

Socket.dev; New York (NY); On-site; USD 200,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple Pay's architecture team seeks an Architect to set the technical direction for reliability, scalability, and availability across mission-critical systems. You will translate opinions into concrete architecture, tooling, and practices used in production.

The role involves reviewing designs, prototyping decisions, and leading incident reviews with cross-functional teams to improve systemic resiliency at Apple’s global scale.

Qualifications

• Proven track record designing and operating distributed systems at scale in high-throughput, low-latency environments.
• Deep expertise in replication, partitioning, consensus, eventual vs strong consistency, idempotency, and failure handling.
• Able to operate across large landscapes and drive alignment across teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for Apple's distributed systems, focusing on reliability, observability, and scalability.
• Review designs for resilience gaps, and lead incident postmortems to drive systemic fixes.
• Collaborate with client, server, devops, and product teams to account for real-world operational constraints.

Skills

Distributed systems design

Reliability engineering

Observability

Job description

Apple Pay builds and operates the systems that power Apple Pay transactions at global scale, where downtime or a scalability shortfall means a failed payment for a real person at a register or checkout. This Architect role is responsible for setting the technical direction for how Apple Pay's systems achieve reliability, scalability, and availability - not just in design docs, but in the metrics, SLOs, and operational practices that hold them accountable in production. It is a role for someone with strong, well-reasoned opinions about how distributed systems should behave under load, failure, and partial degradation, and who can translate those opinions into concrete architecture, tooling, and team practices across the org.

Description

The Architect will own the technical direction for Apple Pay's distributed systems - driving reliability engineering practices, observability strategy, and scalability architecture across a high-throughput, payment-critical infrastructure. Day to day, this means reviewing designs for resilience gaps, writing code and prototypes to validate architectural decisions, and leading incident reviews and postmortems that drive systemic fixes. The role also involves close collaboration with client, server, devops, and product engineering teams to ensure architecture decisions account for real-world operational constraints at Apple's global scale.

Minimum Qualifications

Proven track record designing and operating distributed systems at scale in high-throughput, low-latency production environmentsDeep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals: replication, partitioning/sharding, consensus protocols, eventual vs. strong consistency, idempotency, and failure handling across network partitionsHands- Skilled at operating with ambiguity across large, complex system landscapes and driving alignment across multiple teams and stakeholders

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with multi-region or globally distributed systems, including failover and disaster recovery design at scalePrior experience in payments, fraud/risk systems, or other regulated, high-availability financial infrastructureContributions to open-source distributed systems projects or published technical writing on the subjectExperience establishing or maturing a devops/reliability practice within an organization