Frontend Architect (AI Experiences), Retail and Marcom Engineering

Apple•Sunnyvale, CA

23h

About The Position

Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization builds and operates technology systems supporting Apple’s customers and employees. Retail and Marcom Engineering develops the systems and experiences behind Apple’s online and physical stores, interactive marketing, and creative operations. Within Marcom Engineering, the AI Experiences team builds AI-powered tools for marketing and creative teams, including AI-assisted copy workflows and AI Optimization, as well as AI foundations for engineers and AI agents. The Frontend Architect will set technical direction for AI across the frontend. The role defines how AI supports marketing and creative tools, changes engineering workflows, and uses the design system as a foundation for generated UI. It combines frontend architecture, applied AI, and design systems, including strategy development, system design, and collaboration with partners across Apple.

Requirements

10 years building production web applications, including 3+ years in a senior or architect role setting frontend direction across teams.
Expert-level TypeScript and React, including component architecture, server-side rendering such as Next.js, schema-first data such as GraphQL, and performance at scale.
Led architecture of a design system, component platform, or shared frontend infrastructure adopted by multiple teams.
Shipped LLM-powered features or AI developer tooling to production, such as agentic workflows, AI-assisted code review, tool use or function calling, or structured outputs.
Daily hands-on use of AI coding agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or Cursor, with a clear point of view on their strengths, limitations, and how to review their output.
Deep knowledge of accessibility, including WCAG 2.1 AA, and how to build it into systems by default.
BS or MS in Computer Science, or equivalent professional experience.
Track record of setting technical direction and building alignment across competing priorities, with excellent written and verbal communication, including presenting architectural trade-offs to engineering and executive audiences.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing agent-facing tooling, such as MCP servers, CLIs designed for agents, or packaged agent skills and instructions.
Experience designing APIs, schemas, or component metadata that models generate against.
Experience defining evaluation strategies for AI systems, including evals, golden datasets, LLM-as-judge scoring, and regression gates.
Experience designing how AI agents operate in CI/CD, such as AI-assisted code review, automated releases, or agentic feature development with quality gates and human review.
Understanding of AI security and governance, including least-privilege agent permissions, prompt injection, and privacy-preserving telemetry.
Familiarity with design tokens, theming, and generative-UI approaches that keep AI-generated interfaces on-brand.
A record of published architecture decisions, RFCs, or white papers that influenced direction across an organization.
Experience in large, multi-team enterprise environments navigating governance, security review, and cross-organizational dependencies.
Experience working amid ambiguity and defining strategy as underlying AI capabilities evolve.

Responsibilities

Define the frontend AI strategy and multi-quarter roadmap across AI-powered experiences, AI-assisted engineering, and agent-ready UI foundations.
Research emerging capabilities such as agent frameworks, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and generative UI, and determine where to lead, follow, or wait.
Design systems including machine-readable component registries, agent-facing interfaces such as MCP servers and agent-friendly CLIs, LLM-readable documentation, and the architecture for AI-powered tools.
Maintain a single source of truth for the different ways people and agents consume frontend systems.
Represent frontend architecture in cross-functional AI efforts with backend, infrastructure, and services architects.
Connect components with application layouts, content management, data, and publishing; drive alignment across integrations and partner with AI and platform teams across Apple.
Write roadmaps, one-pagers, architecture decision records, and RFCs; present, advocate for, and defend technical direction to peers and senior leadership.
Partner with design leadership to define generative-UI guardrails, including design rules, canonical compositions, and usage validation.
Develop real-use-case proofs of concept and scale solutions with security, privacy, evaluations, and usage telemetry.
Promote solutions across Marcom and partner organizations, support adoption, and refine tools based on use.
Guide and delegate to engineers delivering the roadmap, mentor engineers across the organization, and contribute hands-on through prototypes, reference implementations, and code reviews.