Forward Deployed Software Engineer - Platforms Engineering, Enterprise Technology Services

Apple•Austin, TX

About The Position

Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization builds and operates technology systems that support Apple customers and employees. Within Enterprise Technology Services (ETS), the Forge team is building a common platform that enables Apple engineering organizations to take services from allocated capacity through production without assembling separate specialist systems themselves. The platform’s scope spans data-center infrastructure, engineering-facing services, and evolving infrastructure environments, with an AI-first approach to operating and improving the platform. As a Forward Deployed Software Engineer, you will embed with internal engineering teams to understand their applications and workflows, translate ambiguous needs into technical designs, and build and integrate production software through deployment and operational readiness. This is a software engineering-first role covering Go backend services, React and TypeScript applications, APIs, distributed systems, infrastructure automation, and AI-assisted capabilities. You will own what you ship, participate in the on-call rotation for team-owned services, and turn recurring customer problems into reusable platform capabilities. The position calls for sound technical judgment, maintainable architecture, and a focus on operational reliability and lasting improvements.

Requirements

2–8+ 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, as well as 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 software delivery practices, including 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.
BS 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 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

Work directly with internal engineering teams to understand their applications, infrastructure, and workflows, and translate findings into scalable, maintainable software.
Design, build, test, deploy, and iterate on production software, including 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 for environments spanning public cloud, private cloud, Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal infrastructure, balancing scalability, security, availability, and operational complexity.
Develop AI-assisted capabilities using LLM APIs, tool calling, and agentic workflows for engineering, infrastructure, and operational tasks.
Create evaluations, automated tests, and quality controls to make AI-driven features measurable and production-ready.
Improve deployment automation, CI/CD pipelines, and application lifecycle workflows.
Build reliability into software using observability, structured logging, metrics, tracing, and resilient design.
Investigate complex application, infrastructure, networking, and distributed-systems issues and implement sustainable fixes.
Participate in the on-call rotation for team-owned services and contribute to incident response and production reliability.
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.