Software Engineer, Apple Gift Systems

Apple • San Diego, CA

3d

About The Position

As a member of the Payments Engineering organization, you’ll design and build distributed systems that support secure, high-volume payment and gifting experiences worldwide. Our platforms process transactions at global scale, ensuring reliability, privacy, and delight in every interaction. You’ll be part of a team that owns the full product lifecycle — from architecture and implementation through deployment, observability, and on-call operations. You’ll also have the opportunity to shape early development investigations, prototypes, and third-party integrations, and you’ll collaborate across Apple’s engineering, design, and product teams to deliver software that integrates seamlessly into Apple’s ecosystem.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of professional backend software engineering experience
• Experience architecting, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems at large scale.
• The ability to reason about distributed systems trade-offs across consistency, latency, and throughput, and to defend the choices you make.
• A commitment to engineering excellence, continuous improvement, and the curiosity to evaluate and advocate for new technologies and patterns.
• An ability to communicate thoughtfully and clearly, both verbally and in writing, to drive consensus on complex technical concepts with diverse audiences, including global teams and external partners.
• A track record of building and sustaining healthy long-term relationships and technical influence within your team and beyond its boundaries.
• The tenacity and perseverance to lead complex projects all the way from conception to production.
• Experience using generative AI tools throughout the software development lifecycle to produce high-quality software.

Nice To Haves

• Proficiency with Java or Kotlin and Spring, with the judgment to evaluate, review, and debug code regardless of how it was produced.
• Proven development and operational experience with high-volume REST and/or gRPC services (either server-to-server or mobile client facing).
• Experience designing for containerization and orchestration (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience architecting and operating cloud-native applications with resilience, failover, and self-healing as core features.
• Experience delivering and operating services on a managed internal platform, rather than provisioning raw cloud infrastructure.
• The ability to design robust CI/CD pipelines and define infrastructure as code.
• Experience with observability strategies and tools (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Splunk, Datadog).
• A working understanding of security, privacy, and cryptography (e.g. encryption, tokenization, key management, PKI, certificate management, JWT).
• Experience optimizing SQL/NoSQL databases for scale (e.g. Cassandra, DynamoDB, CockroachDB, Oracle).
• Domain knowledge of payments, commerce, gift cards, or other financial systems with strict correctness and audit requirements.
• Passion for people, code, and improving our future

Responsibilities

• Design and build distributed systems that support secure, high-volume payment and gifting experiences worldwide.
• Own the full product lifecycle — from architecture and implementation through deployment, observability, and on-call operations.
• Shape early development investigations, prototypes, and third-party integrations.
• Collaborate across Apple’s engineering, design, and product teams to deliver software that integrates seamlessly into Apple’s ecosystem.
• Work with cross-functional partners to define product objectives.

What This Job Offers

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