Principal Software Architect, Finance Technology Platform

Summary

We are seeking a Software Architect to define and lead the technical vision for Apple's next-generation Finance Technology Platform. This is a platform-defining technical authority role, responsible for designing and building a multi-tenant, AI-native platform that powers financial transaction processing end-to-end — from business event ingestion through validation, enrichment, approval, position tracking, settlement, and reconciliation.

This is not a management role. It is a first-principles engineering leadership role: you will architect the platform, set the standards other teams build against, and personally shape the agentic Finance AI foundations that make this platform fundamentally different from the transaction-recording systems that came before it.

Description

Finance systems have historically been transaction recorders. We intend to build a platform that reasons. As Principal Software Architect, you will architect a platform where AI agents perform the majority of financial processing work end-to-end — interpreting business intent, validating and enriching transactions, routing approvals, matching and adjudicating documents, resolving exceptions, corresponding with counterparties, and preparing settlement — with humans in the loop by policy, not by default.

You will design the platform as a multi-tenant substrate: a shared canonical data model, orchestration engine, sub-ledger, accounting determination service, data layer, and reconciliation engine that multiple engineering teams build their own finance applications on top of, configuring behavior rather than rebuilding shared capability. Domain teams should onboard a new financial flow in weeks through configuration — not months through development.

You will influence architecture before code is written, own the standards that govern financial correctness and auditability, and be the senior technical voice partnering with Finance, Controllership, Tax, and Internal Audit leadership.

Responsibilities

Define and govern the end-to-end architecture for the Finance Technology Platform — transaction ingestion, validation, enrichment, matching, approval, position tracking, accounting determination, settlement, and reconciliation — at enterprise scale.
Architect the platform as a multi-tenant, multi-entity foundation that hosts applications built by multiple engineering teams: tenant isolation, shared-capability reuse, per-tenant policy and configuration, versioned APIs, and independent release cadence — with new financial flows onboarding in weeks via configuration, not months of development.
Own the agentic architecture of the platform: define how AI agents are specified, composed, evaluated, sandboxed, and promoted to production across transaction intake, approval reasoning, document extraction, match adjudication, exception resolution, counterparty correspondence, and settlement optimization.
Design the agent harness and its supporting infrastructure — tool/function interfaces over the platform's own APIs, graph-based orchestration and multi-agent hand-off, context assembly and short/long-term memory, retrieval over policy, contract, and master-data corpora, structured output validation, deterministic replay, and cost/latency budgets with graceful degradation to deterministic paths.
Establish the evaluation and safety discipline for agentic finance: golden datasets, offline and online evals gating CI, confidence thresholds and human-in-the-loop escalation policy, guardrails against injection via externally supplied documents, full audit trails for agent actions, and clear boundaries where AI is never authoritative — money movement, posting, and control points stay deterministic and verifiable.
Set the core platform patterns: a single canonical polymorphic document model carrying correlation identity end to end, saga-based orchestration with compensating transactions and idempotency, a universal sub-ledger that decouples business-semantic position from accounting determination, a multi-GAAP account-determination layer, and business/matching/accounting rules expressed as versioned, reviewable, auditable configuration rather than compiled logic.
Own financial-grade correctness and controls: event-sourced immutable state transitions, strict isolation for balance mutations, exactly-once settlement and duplicate-detection guarantees, full lineage from source document to sub-ledger to GL, continuous reconciliation as a first-class plane (source→sub-ledger and sub-ledger→GL) with break classification and ownership, and SOX, tax, transfer-pricing,g and regional regulatory compliance by design.
Define reliability and operability standards for the platform and its hosted applications — SLOs/SLAs, error budgets, observability, engineering scorecards.
Serve as the senior technical authority for Finance Technology: drive architectural alignment across engineering teams, partner with Finance, Controllership, Tax, and Audit leadership, write the decision records the organization builds against, leverage Apple-wide capabilities rather than rebuilding them, and mentor and elevate Senior and Staff engineers.

Minimum Qualifications

10+ years of software engineering experience, including deep expertise in architecting large-scale distributed transactional systems where correctness is non-negotiable.
Demonstrated experience as the lead architect of a platform used by multiple engineering teams — multi-tenancy, extensibility, versioned APIs, and configuration-driven behavior.
Hands-on experience building AI-native applications in production, including harness engineering: agent runtimes, tool/function calling, structured output validation, graph-based orchestration, context management, and memory systems.
Practical depth in the modern agentic stack — retrieval and vector search, embeddings, agent frameworks and graph orchestration libraries, model evaluation and observability tooling, and prompt/context engineering at production scale.
Experience designing evaluation, guardrail, and human-in-the-loop strategies for AI systems operating on consequential decisions.
Strong foundation in event-driven and event-sourced architecture, saga/workflow orchestration, streaming platforms, change data capture, and transactional data stores.
Experience with enterprise financial or transaction-processing domains — ledgers and sub-ledgers, payables, receivables, payments, settlement, or high-volume financial event processing.
Experience building or integrating with ERP and financial systems of record, and with document and data ingestion formats and pipelines (EDI, cXML, OCR/document AI, CDC feeds).
Experience with regulated, audited, or high-trust systems and their compliance implications.
Track record of technical leadership and architectural influence across large, complex organizations.
Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts to executive, finance, and engineering audiences alike.
Demonstrated success mentoring and elevating technical talent across global teams.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

15+ years of experience, with a portion spent architecting finance, accounting, or payments platforms at global scale.
Deep functional knowledge of one or more financial lifecycles end-to-end — procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, record-to-report, expense, royalties, partner or developer payouts, or intercompany settlement — including approval hierarchies, matching and tolerance frameworks, tax determination, payment terms, and period close.
Experience extending or decomposing monolithic enterprise systems into service-based platforms that interoperate with the existing system of record, while the business ran uninterrupted.
Experience designing sub-ledger and account-determination layers, multi-GAAP/statutory reporting, multi-entity and multi-currency processing, and intercompany netting.
Experience with continuous reconciliation and break-management systems at scale.
Experience building agentic systems that take real-world actions with money, contracts, or regulated data — including sandboxing, least-privilege tool access, and defense against injection via untrusted third-party documents.
Experience with fine-tuning, distillation, or model routing to balance accuracy against cost and latency in production agent workloads.
Experience with ML for finance: anomaly and fraud detection, cash forecasting, transaction classification, duplicate detection.
Background in developer experience for platform consumers — SDKs, local test harnesses, simulation environments, and self-service onboarding.
Experience evolving engineering culture toward measurable reliability, correctness, cost ownership, and evaluation-driven AI development.

Pay & Benefits — Sunnyvale, 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 $262,500 and $394,000, 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.