Senior Software Engineer - Platform Apps & Technologies

Summary

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 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

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with developer tools or developer productivity systems
Experience with open source or inner source
MS in Computer Science or related experience

Pay & Benefits — Cupertino, California, 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 $150,400 and $277,600, 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.