Forward Deployed Software Engineer - Platforms Engineering, Enterprise Technology Services

Apple • Austin, TX

3d

About The Position

The Forward Deployed Software Engineer will embed with engineering teams that use Apple’s Forge platform, learn their applications and workflows, and build software that addresses their needs. This is a software engineering-first role spanning customer discovery, translating ambiguous requirements into technical designs, production implementation, system integration, deployment, and operational readiness. The engineer will share an on-call rotation for team-owned services and use operational experience to identify and address platform gaps.

The work includes Go backend services, React and TypeScript applications, REST and gRPC APIs, distributed systems, and automation across public and private cloud, Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal environments. It also includes AI-assisted capabilities such as LLM integrations and agentic workflows, with evaluations and quality controls to ensure they are measurable and reliable in production. The engineer is expected to work directly with engineering customers, make practical technical decisions, produce maintainable software, and identify opportunities to turn recurring customer requests into reusable platform capabilities.

Forge is part of Enterprise Technology Services within Apple’s Information Systems and Technology organization. It is building a shared platform that enables Apple engineering teams to take services from allocated capacity through to production, with a broad charter spanning data-center infrastructure and the surfaces used by engineering teams. The team emphasizes ownership, security, reliability, and improving the platform other teams build on.

Requirements

• At least 2 years of professional software engineering experience designing and delivering production software.
• Strong backend development skills in Go, or in 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 such as Route 53 or an equivalent.
• 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, evaluate implementation options, and choose a practical path forward.
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills and ability to work directly with engineering customers.

Nice To Haves

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 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 equivalent.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Embed with engineering teams that use the platform to understand their applications, workflows, and problems.
• Translate ambiguous customer requirements into technical designs and practical implementation plans.
• Design, build, test, integrate, deploy, and support production software and platform capabilities.
• Develop across Go backend services, React and TypeScript applications, REST and gRPC APIs, distributed systems, and infrastructure automation.
• Build AI-assisted capabilities, including LLM integrations and agentic workflows, and develop evaluations and quality controls for production use.
• Share an on-call rotation for services owned by the team and contribute to operational readiness, incident response, and reliability improvements.
• Identify recurring customer needs that should become reusable platform capabilities rather than one-off integrations.
• Take ownership of shipped work and improve the maintainability, architecture, and reliability of existing systems.
• Drive alignment and influence partner engineering teams on multi-team projects.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed