Staff Software Engineer - ASE Content Architecture Team

Apple Services Engineering (ASE)'s Solutions Architecture & Platform team is seeking a versatile and highly skilled Staff Software Engineer to design, develop, test, and support software solutions across our platform ecosystem. Our platforms provide secure, reliable, and scalable infrastructure for processing metadata and enabling business operations across Apple's internal services. This includes supporting the delivery of digital content to storefronts, powering reporting systems, and building internal tools and applications. In this role, you will help design and implement scalable data infrastructure, containerized environments, and intelligent content systems. You'll work across real-time data pipelines, test data automation, and machine learning-driven metadata and documentation tools. The problems we solve are complex and impactful, requiring technical depth, strategic thinking, and a passion for tackling challenges at scale. If you thrive at the intersection of distributed systems, data engineering, and intelligent automation, this is your opportunity to shape the future of Apple's content and analytics platforms.

Description As a Staff Software Engineer, you will play a key role in designing and building critical platforms, services, and tools that empower engineers across Apple to develop secure and scalable services. This is a highly technical and collaborative position, requiring close partnership with engineering teams across Apple Services Engineering (ASE) to understand stakeholder needs, align on objectives, and deliver high-quality software that meets Apple's standards for performance, security, and reliability. Your day-to-day responsibilities will include gathering and refining requirements, designing solutions, writing and testing code, and integrating services to ensure an exceptional user experience. You will also contribute to prototyping efforts, mentor team members, participate in design and code reviews, and support incident analysis. As a Staff Software Engineer, your expertise will help guide technical direction, prioritize critical features, and drive the delivery of robust, high-impact solutions. In this role, you will: * Develop transformation platform to unify change data capture (CDC) streams from heterogeneous source systems and deliver them to a centralized data lake in Iceberg format, supporting both initial ingestion and incremental updates. * Build a platform for on-demand, containerized test environments that load targeted production data into isolated databases using minimal input. * Modernize and optimize a self-service data exploration platform by contributing across backend, middleware, and frontend layers, while enabling near real-time data updates through streaming pipelines. * Collaborate on machine learning-based systems to automate metadata generation and support natural language interfaces for querying data. You'll work closely with engineering, infrastructure, QA, and data teams to design resilient systems, standardize data pipelines, and enable scalable, intelligent solutions across the company.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of software or data engineering experience.
• Full-Stack Development experience, including backend systems (Java, Spark SQL) and frontend frameworks (React), with knowledge of distributed search engines like SOLR.
• Proficiency in Java and strong understanding of distributed systems and backend development.
• Hands-on experience with stream processing (e.g., Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming).
• Practical knowledge of data lake architectures, especially Apache Iceberg or similar formats.
• Experience with CDC pipelines and integrating diverse database systems (e.g., Oracle, Postgres, NoSQL).
• Proven ability to develop and manage Dockerized applications and deploy in Kubernetes environments.
• Experience working with large-scale data pipelines, schema evolution, and metadata management.
• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science or Equivalent

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience unifying CDC transformations into a standard framework.
• Familiarity with ML/LLM solutions for metadata, NLP querying, or intelligent documentation systems.
• Background in test data automation and containerized database environments.
• Experience building enterprise-grade search and indexing systems.
• Strong collaboration skills and ability to work across engineering disciplines.

Pay & Benefits 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 $175,800 and $312,200, 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 .