Senior Software Engineer, Apple Ads

Apple • Cupertino, CA

1d

About The Position

Join Apple Ads Engineering to help build an advertising platform serving the App Store, Apple News, Stocks, and Apple TV. The team’s technology helps people discover content, supports creators and publishers, and connects advertisers with audiences while maintaining Apple’s commitment to privacy.

In this role, you will design, develop, and operate distributed services that enable real-time ad selection. You will architect low-latency, high-availability, high-throughput ad-serving systems in a cloud environment; build secure, scalable data-processing pipelines for petabyte-scale datasets; and implement performant services that handle high data volumes and query rates. The role focuses on candidate retrieval, with opportunities to contribute to other backend systems and apply algorithmic search, machine learning, NLP, and AI.

You will collaborate with engineering, product, infrastructure, indexing, search, serving, operations, and program management partners to define requirements and deliver production-quality solutions. You will write clean, efficient, well-documented code, participate in code reviews, and mentor other engineers. The role calls for a passion for privacy-protecting products and the ability to thrive amid rapidly changing priorities.

Requirements

• 6+ years of industry experience architecting and developing internet-scale server software for Linux systems, including scalable microservices or data-driven platforms.
• Strong computer science fundamentals, including algorithms and data structures.
• Strong coding skills in Go, Java, Rust, C++, Scala, or a similar object-oriented or functional language.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating scalable microservices.
• Experience with search technologies such as Lucene, Solr, or Elasticsearch.
• Expertise with NoSQL datastores such as Cassandra.
• Proficiency with data-processing technologies such as Kafka, Spark, or Flink, and methods for processing petabyte-scale datasets.
• Experience with AWS services such as Amazon S3, EC2, and EKS/Kubernetes.
• Strong problem-solving and debugging skills.
• Demonstrated ability to work on complex problems and systems, independently or as part of a team, and deliver complete systems end to end.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including working effectively with technical and non-technical cross-functional teams.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

• Experience creating technology for algorithmic search, machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence.
• Experience building ad-serving, recommendation, or large-scale retrieval systems.
• Familiarity with real-time bidding, candidate retrieval, or ranking pipelines.
• Experience operating services with strict latency and availability SLOs.
• Familiarity with privacy-preserving system design and data-handling practices.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including consensus, replication, and fault tolerance.
• Motivation to work in a fast-paced, challenging environment and learn new technologies.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and operate distributed services for real-time ad selection.
• Architect and build low-latency, high-availability, high-throughput ad-serving systems in a cloud environment.
• Engineer secure, scalable data-processing pipelines that operate on petabyte-scale datasets.
• Implement performant services that handle very high data volumes and query rates.
• Collaborate across teams to ensure optimal and correct ads are available for real-time selection, with observability and flexibility for stakeholders.
• Contribute to backend systems, including candidate retrieval and potentially algorithmic search, machine learning, NLP, and AI solutions.
• Write clean, efficient, well-documented code and participate in code reviews.
• Mentor other engineers on the team.
• Work with internal partners across indexing, search, serving, operations, and program management to define requirements and deliver high-quality solutions.

What This Job Offers

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