Technical Lead, Distributed Systems for Payments

Apple, Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple Inc. is seeking a technical lead to architect and evolve the distributed services powering Apple Card and Savings.

You will stay hands-on with code and operations, driving scalable, reliable systems and guiding cross-team collaboration during complex integrations with financial partners and internal Apple services. You will shape architecture, set release standards, and mentor engineers while maintaining a strong focus on reliability, testability, and customer trust across multi-region

Qualifications

• Experience architecting, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems at scale.
• Hands-on software development in Kotlin or Java.
• Operational leadership: incident response, SLOs, and architectural improvements.
• Track record leading cross-team, multi-quarter projects and external partner negotiations.
• Testing-first approach: unit, integration, contract, end-to-end testing.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and operate mission-critical distributed services at large scale.
• Lead large, multi-quarter engineering efforts including complex integrations with external partners.
• Drive technical discussions across teams and authors specifications for external partners.
• Define and enforce SLOs, progressive release strategies, and automation standards.
• Lead incident response and translate learnings into architectural improvements.
• Review code/designs to raise the engineering bar and ensure testability from the start.
• Mentor senior engineers and shape team engineering strategy and culture.
• Champion AI-assisted development tooling to improve code quality and review throughput.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kotlin/Java

Spring

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

Incident response

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Spring

Job description

Apple Inc. is seeking a technical lead to architect and evolve the distributed services powering Apple Card and Savings.

You will stay hands-on with code and operations, driving scalable, reliable systems and guiding cross-team collaboration during complex integrations with financial partners and internal Apple services. You will shape architecture, set release standards, and mentor engineers while maintaining a strong focus on reliability, testability, and customer trust across multi-region