Senior Software Engineer — Service Observability & Detection

Apple • Cupertino, CA

6d

About The Position

Apple is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for the Service Observability & Detection team within Wallet, Payments, and Commerce (WPC). The team owns the observability and detection layer across WPC services, including Apple Pay, Apple Wallet, Apple Cash, Tap to Pay, and commerce platforms. It defines telemetry strategy and instrumentation standards and builds telemetry pipelines, SLO frameworks, alerting architectures, and detection systems that provide real-time visibility into service health and help identify failures before they affect customers.

The role works at the intersection of platform engineering, reliability, and operations, developing systems that scale across hundreds of services, thousands of APIs, and billions of transactions. The engineer partners with offering owners, platform teams, operations, and other product and engineering teams. As a senior individual contributor, the role leads through influence, drives adoption across teams, and establishes telemetry and reliability standards for how WPC builds, monitors, and operates services.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in observability, reliability engineering, or telemetry platform development.
• Proven experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives and driving alignment, adoption, and delivery across teams not directly managed.
• Experience building telemetry and observability systems from the ground up, including instrumentation strategies, telemetry pipelines, and data models at large scale.
• Deep hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry, including SDK instrumentation, Collector architecture (agent and gateway tiers), processors, exporters, context propagation, and metadata enrichment at scale.
• Strong understanding of SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets, and hands-on experience defining, implementing, and operating SLO-based alerting in production.
• Experience designing alerting architectures for complex distributed systems, including burn-rate alerts, multi-signal correlation, intelligent routing, and alert storm prevention.
• Strong proficiency in at least two of Kotlin, Java, Go, or Python.
• Experience with observability platforms such as Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, or Splunk, including APM, metrics, traces, monitors, and dashboards.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, including microservices architectures, API gateways, event-driven systems, and service-to-service dependencies.
• Experience solving large-scale telemetry challenges, including sampling strategies, high-cardinality metric management, tail-based sampling, cross-service trace stitching, and pipeline reliability under load.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, including the ability to translate technical observability concepts into clear strategies for engineering leadership and partner teams.
• Demonstrated ability to establish engineering standards and drive adoption through influence, documentation, and tooling rather than mandate.
• Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in payment systems, financial services platforms, or other high-compliance, high-availability domains.
• Experience building observability platforms or telemetry infrastructure for an entire engineering organization.
• Experience leading technical initiatives across organizational boundaries and driving adoption without direct authority.
• Experience applying AI/ML to operational problems such as anomaly detection, intelligent alert grouping, automated incident correlation, or predictive alerting.
• Familiarity with incident management workflows and tools, including how detection supports triage, escalation, and resolution.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform or Pulumi for managing observability resources as code.
• Experience with service catalog or service registry systems, including ownership models, dependency mapping, and health scoring at organizational scale.
• Experience building systems for both engineering teams and SOC/NOC operators, balancing signal depth with clarity of action.

Responsibilities

• Design and build telemetry foundations, instrumentation standards, and telemetry pipelines for WPC services.
• Develop SLO frameworks and detection and alerting systems that provide actionable visibility into service health.
• Design observability systems that scale across services, APIs, and high volumes of transactions and events.
• Partner with offering owners, platform teams, operations, and product and engineering teams.
• Lead cross-functional technical initiatives and drive alignment, adoption, and delivery across teams without direct authority.
• Establish and promote organization-wide telemetry and reliability standards through influence, documentation, and tooling.

What This Job Offers

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