Software Development Engineer, Database (OpenSearch), AI & Data Platforms (AiDP)

Apple • Austin, TX

15h

About The Position

Do you want to help build some of the largest and most consequential enterprise and customer technology systems in the world? Join Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization. IS&T is the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. It’s Apple’s central nervous system. Supporting 2.5 billion active Apple devices, processing billions of secure transactions, and keeping the technology that defines modern life running flawlessly, IS&T makes the impossible feel effortless. Do you love building solutions to handle global complexity and immense scale? Imagine what you could do here. AI & Data Platforms (AiDP) is IS&T's engine for AI-powered innovation. The team brings together data, application development, and machine learning — including generative AI — along with data services and customer success functions, to help IS&T build solutions more efficiently and streamline the adoption and embedding of generative AI across Apple. The people here at Apple don't just craft products - they build the kind of wonder that's revolutionized entire industries! It's the diversity of those people and their ideas that encourages the innovation that runs through everything we do, from amazing technology to industry-leading environmental efforts. Join Apple, and help us leave the world better than we found it! The Data Services OpenSearch team at Apple invites passionate engineers to join our team to develop and contribute to OpenSearch, the leading Open-Source Search and Analytics suite. Our engineers develop and maintain OpenSearch solutions that powers critical observability, log analytics, and real-time monitoring for Apple’s critical services across Business units. You will be joining a team of experts working on modern search technologies, distributed systems, and data analytics engineering, helping push the limits of Open-Source OpenSearch to deliver enterprise-class performance, scalability, reliability and security. This role offers the opportunity to impact the experiences of millions of users by developing scalable search, monitoring and analytics solutions for Apple’s critical services. The OpenSearch team at Apple is responsible for developing and managing a highly available, cloud-based search service. We seek innovative, detail-oriented engineers who can contribute to a wide range of OpenSearch components, including query parsing, indexing, cluster management, security, scalability, and new feature development. Your contributions will drive the service’s performance, availability, and resilience, supporting a variety of applications and services at Apple.

Requirements

• Understanding of distributed computing concepts, including sharding, data replication, and fault tolerance.
• Familiarity with operating system concepts such as process management and network I/O.
• Comprehensive knowledge of indexing, searching and analytics concepts (e.g., text analysis, relevancy tuning, and multi-modal search).
• Advanced software engineering skills with Java ecosystem expertise, object-oriented design principles, and experience in building maintainable, scalable applications.
• Hands-on experience with production deployment workflows, including CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration, version control systems, and distributed systems observability.
• Experience with advanced topics like autoscaling, request tracing, and performance tuning in high-throughput systems.
• Strong understanding of testing methodologies and experience with debugging and profiling tools.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work closely with both the Search Engineering and DevOps teams.
• A customer-focused mindset is essential when delivering solutions to internal stakeholders, and collaboration with teams across different global locations is crucial.
• Mentorship abilities to guide and support junior engineers are also important.
• 2+ years of relevant experience in the IT industry, specifically in search engines, distributed systems
• High proficiency in languages such as Java, Kotlin, or Go
• Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, and indexing techniques specific to search engines
• In-depth knowledge of search engine internals, ideally with OpenSearch or similar platforms such as OpenSearch or Elasticsearch or Solr
• Strong knowledge of Linux/Unix Internals, Systems/Application Design & Architecture
• Expertise in identifying performance bottlenecks and implementing optimization strategies
• Bachelor Science in Computer Science or related fields or equivalent work experience
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities, with a keen attention to detail.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with proven collaboration abilities
• Passionate about Open-Source contributions and community engagement.
• Experience in contributing to or maintaining Open-Source software projects.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with public clouds (GCP or AWS)
• Experience with Kubernetes

Responsibilities

• Develop new features and implement bug fixes in OpenSearch project and related plugins
• Develop and maintain Apple-internal control plane for OpenSearch
• Collaborate with the DevOps team in case of production escalations.
• Act as a subject matter expert to help our partners and users to understand the technology better

What This Job Offers

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