Senior Backend Engineer, Apple News

Cupertino, California, United States Software and Services

The growing Apple Services group is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the InfoApps org to help shape what comes next for one of Apple's flagship content experiences. You'll join a close-knit, highly collaborative team where your work powers the apps used by hundreds of millions of users around the world.

Description

As a senior backend engineer on this team, you'll build the distributed services and event-driven pipelines that ingest, process, and serve content at massive scale to support Apple News and related apps. You'll lead projects from design through launch: defining architecture, modeling data for performance and growth, and making sure systems stay reliable in production. Beyond your own code, you'll drive technical decisions across partner teams, and use modern tools, including AI-assisted development, to raise the bar for how the team builds software.

Responsibilities

• Design, Build and enhance highly-scalable backend services and data pipelines powering Apple News and related apps capable of serving thousands of requests-per-second
• Lead assigned projects end to end and deliver high-quality results on schedule
• Collaborate closely with a cross-functional team of engineers throughout the entire product lifecycle
• Develop event-driven architectures and messaging pipelines to support real-time data flows
• Lead and contribute technical decisions around NoSQL datastores, search infrastructure, and service design
• Utilize CI/CD tooling and version control systems to maintain code quality and deployment reliability

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or similar technical discipline (or equivalent relevant experience)
• 5-10 years of demonstrated experience in shipping scalable, maintainable, and testable backend systems
• Strong background in Java and Spring for backend service development
• Demonstrated ability to design and build high-scale, distributed backend services with event-driven architectures and pipelines (e.g., Kafka)
• Solid experience with data stores, including data modeling and schema design for production systems
• Track record of strong problem-solving abilities in complex technical environments
• Effective use of AI-assisted development tools to speed up design, coding, and testing with high quality
• Strong communication and collaboration skills in a team-oriented environment

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven experience as the technical lead for a team of engineers - setting architecture and direction, mentoring others, and raising the bar for engineering quality
• Hands-on experience with distributed NoSQL databases, especially Apache Cassandra, including query-driven data modeling, partitioning, and performance tuning.
• Experience in search technologies such as Apache Solr
• Experience with CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins) and build tools (e.g., Gradle, Bazel)

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.

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant

At Apple, we believe accessibility is a fundamental human right. You’ll find that idea reflected in everything here - in our culture, our benefits and our digital tools. By welcoming as many perspectives as possible, we help you build a career where you feel like you belong.
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Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.