Senior Cloud Engineer

Cary, North Carolina, United States Software and Services

Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, new ideas have a way of becoming phenomenal products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. Bring passion and dedication to your job and there's no telling what you could accomplish. Apple Pay is transforming the industry in payments, transit and identity, and we're aggressively focusing on the customer's digital wallet experience. Our scale and security demands create unique opportunities for innovative and creative solutions which contribute to millions of customer's daily interactions.

Description

The Wallet, Payments and Commerce (WPC) Cloud Engineering team is looking for an experienced Senior Cloud Engineer to take ownership of complex, ambiguous problems and drive cross-functional solutions that scale with our growth. In this role you'll independently lead significant pieces of our cloud platform, set technical direction on project teams, and raise the bar on quality, security, and customer focus across the organization.

Responsibilities

• Own the design and delivery of platform capabilities end-to-end — from gathering requirements with product and partner teams to running them in production.
• Drive technical direction on multi-quarter initiatives, framing trade-offs and aligning engineering, security, quality, and SRE partners around shared outcomes.
• Architect and evolve our platform-as-a-product offerings, treating internal developers as first-class customers and reducing the friction between idea and production.
• Lead the design and rollout of security-first patterns and policy-as-code controls (Kyverno, OPA) so the platform makes the secure path the easy path.
• Solve complex problems using a mix of open-source and in-house tooling, balancing pragmatism with the long-term health of the platform.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code review, design partnership, and targeted coaching on complex assignments.
• Scale existing technologies and introduce new ones to outpace growth projections, and shepherd them from experiment to production-grade adoption.
• Represent the team in cross-organization initiatives, partnering with adjacent platform, security and developer teams to keep our technical strategy cohesive.
• Evangelize next-generation cloud and DevOps practices, building the credibility and shared understanding needed to bring them to fruition across WPC.

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of Cloud infrastructure and platform engineering experience, with a track record of owning systems end-to-end in production.
• Experience building platforms and platform-as-a-product… You think about internal developers as customers, and you've shipped paved roads that people actually want to use.
• Kubernetes and Containers… Been there, done that, and now you're the person others come to when the cluster is on fire. You've owned multi-tenant, multi-cluster, multi-region footprints end-to-end.
• Infrastructure as Code, with deep Crossplane and Terraform experience… You've designed composition and provider patterns at scale, not just consumed them. The console is for read-only.
• Security-first architecture with Policy as Code (Kyverno, OPA/Gatekeeper)… You bake guardrails into the platform so the secure path is the easy path, and you can defend your trade-offs to security partners.
• Public cloud expertise across AWS, GCP, and/or Azure… You know which services to use, when to use them, and — just as importantly — when not to.
• GitOps and CI/CD with Flux, Jenkins, Kargo… Everything ships through pipelines, promotion is declarative, and rollback is a non-event.
• Strong networking fundamentals (NATs, TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, mTLS)… You can debug a cross-region connectivity issue without flinching.
• Linux internals and systems-level troubleshooting… When the symptom is "it's slow sometimes," you know how to find the actual cause.
• Microservices and distributed systems experience… You've designed for failure, not just success.
• Experience with service meshes (Istio, Traefik, LinkerD) and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Sensu).
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, drive technical direction across a project team, and align solutions with business objectives in ambiguous, cross-functional environments.
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related field or equivalent work experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years of work experience is highly desirable.

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

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Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.