Senior Software Platform Engineer, Apple Pay

Summary

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.

Responsibilities

Design and build Kubernetes-native services, controllers and APIs in Go, owning each subsystem from design review through production operation.
Turn complex infrastructure provisioning into simple declarative APIs, so application teams can describe what they need without having to manage the underlying complexity themselves.
Make the platform fast and predictable at scale, and diagnose the performance and correctness problems that surface there, from hot loops and unbounded work queues to memory growth and convergence failures across regions.
Raise the engineering bar through meaningful test coverage, code review that improves designs rather than syntax, and the observability you need to run what you build.
Participate in an on-call rotation for the systems you own, and turn each incident into a permanent fix or a guardrail rather than a runbook entry.
Work AI-forward by using coding agents and LLM-based tooling as a normal part of development, and own the correctness of what you ship regardless of what drafted it.

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.

Pay & Benefits — New York City, New York, United States

At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $184,700 and $324,800, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.

Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs. Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan. You’ll also receive benefits including: Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation. Learn more about Apple Benefits

Note: Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

Application Deadline

Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.