Sr. Software Engineer (Distributed System)

Sr. Software Engineer (Distributed System)

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At Apple, the information powering Siri, Spotlight, Apple Maps, and Apple Intelligence doesn't appear by magic — it's harvested at massive scale from the live web by a distributed crawl platform you'll help build and operate. You'll join a small, high-impact team responsible for a system that continuously fetches, renders, and extracts structured knowledge from billions of web pages — feeding the intelligence layer behind Apple's most-used products.

The web crawl infrastructure you'll work on is a large-scale, distributed system that fetches, renders, and extracts structured knowledge from billions of web pages — powering Siri, Apple Intelligence, Spotlight, Apple Maps, and more. We're looking for an engineer who doesn't just build distributed systems but who leverages modern AI coding tools as a core part of their daily engineering workflow to move faster, write higher-quality code, and tackle more ambitious problems than traditional development cycles allow. This is a deeply technical role embedded in a production platform with strict latency SLOs, complex failure domains, and high operational stakes. You'll work across the full crawl lifecycle, from how requests are scheduled and dispatched, to how pages are fetched and rendered, to how structured data is extracted and delivered downstream. As a member of this team, you will own the critical components of the systems and will be responsible for shaping the roadmap.

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years or experience building scalable distributed systems at scale
• Strong understanding of data structures and algorithms.
• Strong systems programming background — Rust, Scala, or Go
• Solid understanding of async programming models, queue-based architectures, and at-least-once / exactly-once delivery semantics
• Deep expertise of Cloud infrastructure deployments, managing workloads across heterogeneous clusters (EKS and/or bare-metal)
• Hands-on Kubernetes experience — multi-cluster, resource tuning, HPA, rolling deployment
• Hands-on AWS experience: SQS, S3, MSK (Kafka), EKS, IAM, VPC, Transit Gateways
• Familiarity with Kafka — topic management, consumer group lag, partition rebalancing
• Experience defining metrics, writing alert rules, and building dashboards for distributed services
• Excellent interpersonal skills able to work independently as well as cross-functionally
• BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in Web Crawl is a plus
• Headless browser infrastructure at scale is a plus
• Flink or Spark streaming/batch pipelines over Iceberg is a plus

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 $147,400 and $272,100, 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. Learn about accessibility in Apple's workplace Learn about reasonable accommodations for job applicants Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis. Submit Resume Back to search results See all roles in Santa Clara