Principal Software Engineer, Retail Foundations

Apple is where individual imaginations gather together, committing to the values that lead to great work. Every new product we build, service we create, or Apple Store experience we deliver is the result of us making each other's ideas stronger. That happens because every one of us shares a belief that we can make something wonderful and share it with the world.\\n\\nApple Retail Engineering team builds the software systems that power all the magical experiences we offer to our Apple Store customers, be it digital or in-person. As a part of this organization, Retail Engineering Foundations group focuses on developer productivity, runtime environments, and common frameworks & platforms for all Retail Engineering teams.\\n\\nWhen you join Retail Foundations as a principal-level Software Engineer, you'll define the long-term technical vision, strategy, and design for foundational frameworks, platforms, and systems that many Apple engineers and mission-critical production apps rely on every day. Together, we'll explore all the ways to improve the software development lifecycle of Apple Store software from code to production, freeing our engineers to do what they do best: Crafting magical experiences for our customers.\\n\\n

As a principal-level Software Engineer, you will architect, design, develop, test, document, improve, and maintain infrastructure and code for frameworks, platforms, and systems for DevOps, CI/CD, runtime environments for dev/test/prod, service discovery, API/RPC gateways, observability, and other similar foundational components of cloud-based, globally-distributed systems.\n\nYou will own every aspect of your projects, from strategy & planning to system architecture, from hands-on implementation to guiding adoption & migrations. You will be encouraged to play an extended role in collaboratively leading the design and implementation of solutions to address the requirements of a diverse set of Retail Engineering teams working on various aspects of online & in-person Apple Store experiences. Your architectural decisions and technical leadership will set precedents that could extend beyond Retail Engineering, with your solutions becoming reference implementations and standards adopted across other Apple organizations.\n\nThe ideal candidate is self-motivated, proactive and results-driven. Attention to detail, dedication to providing high-quality solutions modeling engineering excellence, and ability to work towards timely delivery of projects are all crucial qualities needed to work at Apple as a Software Engineer.\n\nThe ideal candidate will also possess excellent communication and collaboration skills to work with various Retail Engineering teams and their leaders, various internal and external partners, and senior executive leaders of Apple.\n\n

B.S. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional work experience. Graduate degrees preferred.\n\n12+ years experience working on commercial software systems in a professional capacity as a Software and/or DevOps Engineer. Longer experience strongly preferred.\n\n8+ years hands-on experience designing, implementing, shipping, and maintaining high-scale, high-performance, highly available, fault-tolerant, and secure cloud-based distributed systems, including hands-on experience with monolith and microservices architectures, service discovery, API/RPC gateways, and end-to-end observability.\n\n6+ years hands-on experience implementing and/or managing CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure-as-Code solutions to build, test, deploy, and release containerized software applications on cloud-based Kubernetes (e.g. AWS EKS, Google Cloud Platform GKE, Azure AKS, etc.) using build systems similar to Bazel and/or Gradle in a polyglot repository context (i.e. mix of monorepos and polyrepos).\n\n6+ years hands-on experience in Java and one of C++/Rust/Swift/Go/Python/TypeScript, including mastery in concurrency, memory management, and performance optimization techniques. Experience with more than two programming languages strongly preferred.\n\nSolid understanding of relational, NewSQL, and NoSQL in-memory & on-disk databases, as well as data modeling and engineering concepts, data warehouses and data lakes, including schema design, query optimization, and orchestrating transactional data interactions between datastores in globally-distributed systems.\n\nExtensive knowledge of networking concepts & protocols (e.g. HTTP/HTTPS, CDN, edge computing, load balancing, OSI model, etc.).\n\nTrack record of defining multi-year technical strategy for, architecting, leading the development of, and successfully launching multiple major software projects that span multiple, globally-distributed teams across multiple organizations as a hands-on tech lead (TL).\n

Track record of mentoring junior, senior & staff level software engineers, and successfully guiding them through their career growth journeys.\n\nStrong written and verbal communication skills with mastery of long-form writing. Demonstration via presentations in public conferences and/or published articles strongly preferred.\n\nCurrent or past involvement in and/or hands-on contributions to open source projects.\n\nFamiliarity with compliance & security concepts (e.g. SOC2, SOX, CVEs, OWASP, etc.).\n