Principal Platform Engineer - People Systems

Apple • Sunnyvale, CA

1d

About The Position

Apple People Systems builds platforms that support employees throughout their journey, including recruiting, onboarding, core HR, payroll, compensation, and benefits. The Principal Platform Engineer will shape the technical strategy for People Systems, with a focus on configuration-driven platforms and agentic workflows. The platform treats data models, rules, workflows, permissions, screens, and reports as versioned configuration interpreted at runtime, enabling teams close to a problem to change system behavior without waiting for a release.

The role will make architectural decisions that balance delivery speed with long-term platform health and ensure systems are scalable, secure, and resilient by design. It requires technical excellence, product thinking, and the ability to simplify complex systems made up of many interacting components. The engineer will collaborate with product managers and cross-functional engineering teams to understand problems and translate business needs into effective platform solutions.

Requirements

• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience in system design, technical architecture, or solution architecture for large-scale enterprise solutions.
• Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience leading the architecture of a configuration-driven platform used by multiple engineering teams, including metadata models, multi-tenancy, extensibility, versioned APIs, and safe configuration publishing, promotion, and rollback.
• Proficiency across technology stacks, with experience building different types of components such as interpreters or compilers, query and authorization layers, workflow and state engines, search and reporting systems, and UI runtimes.
• Distributed-systems expertise, including consistency models, fault tolerance, partitioning, and failure-mode analysis; experience designing highly available, horizontally scalable systems serving millions of users and high-volume transactions.
• Strong foundation in event-driven and event-sourced architecture, including saga and workflow orchestration, streaming platforms, change data capture, and transactional data stores.
• Experience evolving schemas and contracts at scale, including backward-compatible changes to metadata and configuration models, breaking-change detection, and migration of in-flight data and workflows.
• Deep proficiency in Spring Boot or an equivalent framework and microservices patterns, with asynchronous programming experience using virtual threads, coroutines, or reactive programming.
• Expertise with relational or NoSQL databases at scale, including schema design, query optimization, migrations, and transaction management.
• Hands-on experience with an AI-native software development lifecycle and agent orchestration frameworks, including coding agents, tool calling, graph-based orchestration, context management, and structured-output validation.
• Cloud-native production experience on AWS or a comparable platform, including Kubernetes, identity and access management, cost governance, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and post-mortem practices.
• Ability to set technical direction across teams, break down ambiguous problems without detailed specifications, translate business requirements into designs, and clearly explain trade-offs.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building expression languages, rule engines, or policy engines, including typed abstract syntax trees, multiple execution backends, and differential and conformance testing.
• Experience decomposing or extending monolithic enterprise systems into service-based platforms that interoperate with an existing system of record while business operations continue uninterrupted.
• Background in CQRS, event sourcing, or saga-based orchestration for long-running workflows.
• Familiarity with compliance and audit requirements for sensitive personal information and regulated HR data, as well as AI governance such as drift detection, bias monitoring, explainability, and audit trails.
• Experience putting LLMs and machine learning into production backend services, including inference APIs, RAG pipelines, vector search, embeddings, evaluation and observability tooling, and prompt and context engineering.
• Record of leading cross-functional technical decisions, aligning non-engineering stakeholders on trade-offs, and promoting measurable reliability, correctness, cost ownership, and evaluation-driven development.
• Experience designing APIs consumed by many teams, including versioning, contract stability, and documentation, and integrating with enterprise platforms through APIs, ETL, or event streams.
• Experience improving developer experience for platform consumers through SDKs, local test harnesses, simulation environments, and self-service onboarding.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools and AI-augmented operations such as predictive alerting, automated root-cause analysis, and self-healing runbooks.
• Experience designing evaluation, guardrail, and human-in-the-loop strategies for AI systems that make or inform consequential decisions.
• Hands-on chaos engineering and advanced reliability practices, including failure injection, game days, capacity modeling, and traffic shaping.

Responsibilities

• Shape the technical strategy and architecture for People Systems.
• Architect configuration-driven platforms, including metadata models, multi-tenancy, extensibility, versioned APIs, and safe configuration publishing, promotion, and rollback.
• Make architectural decisions that balance fast delivery with long-term platform health.
• Design scalable, secure, resilient systems for high availability and horizontal scale.
• Set technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Translate ambiguous business requirements into designs and explain trade-offs to engineers and executives.
• Collaborate with product managers and cross-functional engineering teams to understand problems before selecting solutions.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal