Senior Backend Engineer (Find My)

Apple

6d•Onsite

About The Position

Your devices are lost. They have no network connection. Find My locates them anyway, using a crowd-sourced network spanning nearly a billion Apple devices worldwide. Making that work at this scale, reliably and without compromising anyone’s privacy, is the engineering problem. You’ll be working on the services underneath it. We operate as an independent team inside Apple: small, autonomous, and accountable end to end. You’ll own services from design through production. Our roadmap changes. A capability lands, a threat model shifts, a partner team reprioritizes, and the plan from six weeks ago is now the wrong plan. We rewrite it. If you need a stable twelve-month backlog to do your best work, this will frustrate you. If ambiguity reads as opportunity rather than risk, you’ll like it here. Priorities and the problems worth solving are given. How they get solved is largely yours to figure out. We’re looking for people who take a goal and run with it, and who push back when the goal looks wrong. We build frameworks used by ourselves, other teams, and the developer community. The work spans several teams at once, so managing dependencies without letting quality slip is part of the job rather than an afterthought.

Requirements

Enough production experience that you’ve been wrong at scale and learned from it.
Deep Java, not just working Java.
Understanding of the memory model, GC behavior and tuning, allocation pressure, java.util.concurrent beyond synchronized, virtual threads versus classic reactive models.
Proven experience building and scaling customer-facing web services: authentication, authorization, availability, spam control, reliability, and performance tuning under load.
Reason about distributed systems (consistency, partitioning, and failure modes) as a matter of course, not as a later concern.
Strong knowledge of data storage and caching technologies like Postgres, Cassandra, Redis, and memcached or similar.
Experience writing REST based services using Netty or similar frameworks.
Experience in cross team collaboration and communication across multiple timezones.
Able to work in an ambiguous and highly interdependent work environment to get things done in an efficient and tactful way.
Ability to thrive in a multi-functional team on high-profile, critical projects.
Knowledge and experience with CI/CD tooling and full automation testing.
You read the source of your dependencies when the docs run out.
Strong communication, written and verbal.
You can explain a technical decision to engineers and non-engineers alike, write a design document others can follow, and hold your position in a discussion without needing to win it.

Nice To Haves

Knowledge of cryptography standards and protocols (PKCS, KMIP, X.509, AES, KDF, CA) is a significant plus.
Familiarity with ML systems, frameworks, and algorithms is a bonus.
Familiarity with GitHub, and build and deployment tools like Maven, Docker, Spinnaker, and Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

Own services from design through production.
Manage dependencies without letting quality slip.
Build frameworks used by ourselves, other teams, and the developer community.
Debug production issues that only reproduce under real load or real concurrency.
Build and scale customer-facing web services.
Reason about distributed systems (consistency, partitioning, and failure modes).
Write REST based services.
Collaborate and communicate across teams and timezones.
Get things done in an ambiguous and highly interdependent work environment.
Thrive in a multi-functional team on high-profile, critical projects.
Utilize CI/CD tooling and full automation testing.
Read the source of dependencies when documentation is insufficient.
Explain technical decisions to engineers and non-engineers.
Write design documents.
Hold your position in discussions.