Senior Platform Software Engineer

Summary

People at Apple don't just build products - they craft the kind of experience that has revolutionized entire industries. The diverse collection of our people and their ideas inspire innovation in everything we do. Imagine what you could do here! Join Apple, and help us leave the world better than we found it.

Core Data and Intelligence (CDI) is the central data, AI, and machine learning engineering team in ASE Media. We own the primitives other teams build on: privacy-compliant data collection, canonical datasets, AI and machine learning building blocks, and the visualizations that turn them into decisions.

That work shows up across Apple. It is a signal for Music recommendations, a report on the engagement of a new TV+ feature, and the Average Revenue Per User we share with developers. We partner with client and server teams to source data and to ensure collection meets Apple's high privacy standards. CDI also leads privacy engineering within ASE. Apple Services Engineering powers App Store, Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Apple Books, Fitness+, the iTunes Store and more.

The Data Engineering Platform (DEP) is how CDI does that work at scale. DEP builds an opinionated data engineering ecosystem that accelerates data and machine learning engineers. It includes spec-driven development, data quality, AI-driven workflows, cloud portability, CI/CD, integrated privacy and compliance, and scaled operational tooling.

We are looking for a Senior Platform Software Engineer to own the foundations of DEP. You will work across the full depth of the platform, from the command an engineer types to the infrastructure that comes up in production. You will take direct ownership of production systems and set the versioning and release standards the rest of the platform inherits.

Description

As a Senior Platform Software Engineer on DEP, you will own platform systems end to end - the API, the service, the schema, the configuration, the pipeline, and the telemetry. You will combine hands-on engineering with platform-wide thinking, and help set the technical direction the platform follows.

* Design, build, and operate the Go services at the heart of the platform, and shape the declarative interface engineers build against
* Own versioning and immutability as a first-class platform concern - immutable artifact publication, signing, semantic versioning across independently released components, and dependency pinning that holds from producer to consumer
* Define how services ship on the platform: the deployment contract, the environment promotion model, and the Kubernetes topology that platform services and partner teams inherit
* Drive operational excellence for a foundational P1 service: service level objectives, alerting that engineers trust, release provenance, and the availability and rollback posture of services as adoption grows
* Own the developer experience - the command-line tool engineers use daily, project scaffolding, APIs, and documentation. Run onboarding, gather feedback from data engineering teams, and turn recurring questions into product improvements
* Set technical direction: define the engineering standards adopted across CDI, an organization of roughly 550 engineers, evaluate emerging technology, mentor engineers, and help scale AI-assisted development practices across the team

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience
8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent building platform, infrastructure, or developer-facing systems
Strong Go, with a track record of shipping and operating production backend services and command-line tools
Deep hands-on Kubernetes experience: Helm, per-environment configuration layering, probes, resource and replica strategy, rolling updates, and network policy
Demonstrated ownership of CI/CD pipelines and release engineering, including promotion between environments and automated rollback
Strong relational database fundamentals: schema design, indexing, transactions and isolation levels, and managed migrations in a service you operated
Solid distributed systems fundamentals, and hands-on concurrency in Go
Experience owning services in production, not only building them: on-call, incident response, telemetry, and post-incident follow-through, including taking on an established production system, building deep understanding of it quickly, and raising its operational and documentation standards
Demonstrated ability to author reusable skills or agents for AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code or Copilot, adopted by other engineers, and interest in scaling these practices across a team

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with Terraform or OpenTofu beyond consumption - writing providers, managing state backends, or operating a registry, including the HashiCorp provider or module registry protocols, or any artifact registry where immutability and signing are enforced
Policy-as-code and configuration-as-code experience: Open Policy Agent and Rego applied to infrastructure change gating, and PKL, CUE, Jsonnet, or a comparable typed configuration language
Practical command of versioning and immutability in a real system: semantic versioning across independently released components, artifact promotion, dependency pinning, and reproducible builds
Experience building CLI or terminal-UI developer tools that a large engineering population depends on daily
OpenTelemetry instrumentation, and building dashboards and alerts that engineers trust
Working knowledge of mTLS-based workload identity, certificate rotation, and secret management systems
Hands-on depth in PostgreSQL or CockroachDB
Exposure to data governance, privacy engineering, or compliance-driven requirements on a platform, and comfort working with privacy and security partners
Experience as a platform team serving other engineering teams: multi-tenancy, blast radius, shared ownership models, and deprecation, with strong written communication and a track record of developer engagement through onboarding, documentation, and office hours

Pay & Benefits — Seattle, Washington, 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 $142,300 and $263,300, 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.