Forward Deployed Software Engineer - Platforms Engineering

Apple

About The Position

Apple’s Forge team is building a common platform that helps Apple engineering organizations take services from allocated capacity to production. The platform spans infrastructure and the tools engineering teams build against, with a focus on getting teams to production quickly while maintaining security and reliability. Forge is part of Enterprise Technology Services (ETS), within Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization. As a Forward Deployed Software Engineer, you will work directly with internal engineering teams to understand their applications, infrastructure, and workflows, then design and build software to address their needs. This software engineering-first role includes translating ambiguous requirements into technical designs, writing production code, integrating with existing systems, and owning work through deployment and operational readiness. You will also participate in the on-call rotation for services owned by the team. The work spans Go backend services, React and TypeScript applications, REST and gRPC APIs, distributed systems, and automation for public and private cloud, Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal environments. You will also build AI-assisted capabilities, including LLM integrations and agentic workflows, together with evaluations and quality controls to make them measurable and suitable for production. Success includes turning recurring customer challenges into reusable platform capabilities and improving the reliability and maintainability of the systems other teams depend on.

Requirements

At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience designing and delivering production software.
Strong backend development skills in Go, or a comparable language such as Rust, C++, or Python, with the ability to become productive in Go.
Solid understanding of software architecture, REST and gRPC APIs, distributed applications, and relational data modeling.
Hands-on experience with relational and distributed SQL databases, such as PostgreSQL, Oracle, Aurora, or CockroachDB, including schema design, migrations, query performance, and connection management.
Strong networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, subnetting, routing, TLS, and DNS record types, plus practical load-balancing experience across L4 and L7, health checks, session affinity, and DNS-based global traffic management.
Experience with a major cloud provider such as AWS, GCP, or AliCloud across compute, storage, networking, load balancing, and identity and access management.
Working knowledge of Linux, including systemd, processes, filesystems, permissions, and command-line troubleshooting.
Understanding of service-to-service authentication and transport security, including mTLS, PKI and certificate lifecycle, OIDC, and RBAC.
Familiarity with source control, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and production deployments.
Experience operating production services, including observability with metrics, logs, and traces, incident response, and root-cause analysis.
Demonstrated technical leadership on multi-team projects, including driving alignment, influencing partner teams, and raising engineering standards.
Ability to work from loosely defined requirements, assess implementation options, and choose a practical path forward.
Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to work directly with engineering customers.
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience building modern front-end applications with React and TypeScript, including component-based UI development and API integration.
Experience building internal platforms, infrastructure automation, developer tooling, or enterprise software integrations.
Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, containers, and deployment tools such as Helm, Kustomize, Terraform, or Ansible.
Experience building or operating distributed systems, including control planes, job orchestration, work queues, or state reconciliation.
Depth in multi-region data consistency, including locality-aware schema design, follower reads, or partitioning in CockroachDB, Spanner, or an equivalent system.
Experience across hybrid and multi-region infrastructure, including private cloud, virtual machines, and bare-metal systems.
Experience with observability technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or Splunk.
Experience with network virtualization, software-defined networking, or data center network architecture.
Experience with progressive delivery practices such as canary releases, blue/green deployments, and automated rollback.
Hands-on experience integrating LLM APIs, including prompt development, tool and function calling, and multi-step workflows, and developing AI evaluations, agentic workflows, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations.
Demonstrated ability to turn customer-specific requirements into reusable software and platform capabilities.
Experience mentoring engineers, leading design reviews, or setting technical direction for a team.
Exposure to infrastructure or fleet management at scale.

Responsibilities

Work directly with internal engineering teams to understand their applications, infrastructure, and workflows, and translate findings into scalable, maintainable software.
Design, build, test, ship, deploy, and iterate on production software across Go backend services and React and TypeScript applications.
Architect and develop APIs, distributed services, integration frameworks, and automation connecting applications, infrastructure, and enterprise systems.
Build and extend REST and gRPC APIs, including data modeling, authentication, authorization, and API contracts.
Design solutions for hybrid environments spanning public cloud, private cloud, Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal infrastructure.
Develop AI-assisted capabilities using LLM APIs, tool calling, and agentic workflows for engineering, infrastructure, and operational tasks.
Establish evaluations, automated tests, and quality controls for AI-driven features.
Improve deployment automation, CI/CD pipelines, and application lifecycle workflows.
Build reliability into software through observability, structured logging, metrics, tracing, and resilient design.
Investigate complex issues across application, infrastructure, networking, and distributed-system boundaries, and implement sustainable fixes.
Participate in the on-call rotation, incident response, and production reliability work for services the team owns.
Turn recurring customer challenges into reusable features, shared services, and standardized integrations.
Collaborate with software, infrastructure, security, networking, and operations teams.
Produce technical documentation and architectural guidance, and share engineering knowledge across teams.