Sr. Software Engineer, Podcasts Team

Apple • San Francisco, CA

1d

About The Position

Apple Podcasts connects hundreds of millions of listeners with millions of creators around the world. Behind that experience is a backend engineering team within Apple Services Engineering (ASE) that builds the systems responsible for ingesting, processing, and serving one of the largest podcast catalogs on the planet. We're looking for a backend engineer to help us design and scale the services that power Apple Podcasts. If you want to work on high-scale distributed systems that directly shape how people discover and enjoy audio and video content, this is the role.

As a backend engineer on the Apple Podcasts team, you will own server-side systems that process data from millions of podcast providers, manage complex catalog state, and serve content to Apple's global audience. You'll build APIs consumed by other internal systems across Apple, design database schemas for evolving content models, and architect asynchronous data pipelines that must operate reliably across multiple data centers. Your work directly supports cross-functional tentpole features — collaborating with client teams, product, design, business, and operations partners to deliver end-to-end solutions.

Requirements

• 5+ years of current and professional software engineering experience
• Strong server-side Java development experience with expert knowledge of algorithms and data structures
• Experience designing database schemas in both relational and NoSQL databases
• Experience building and operating distributed systems with high availability requirements
• Experience developing APIs (REST or gRPC) consumed by multiple clients
• Experience with message queue systems (Kafka or similar) for asynchronous data processing
• Experience with microservices architecture, including service decomposition, inter-service communication, and independent deployment
• Shipped customer-facing features or product functionality in a production environment
• BS in Computer Science or equivalent industry experience

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Cassandra or other wide-column NoSQL databases at scale
• Experience with reactive/non-blocking programming models (Project Reactor, RxJava, or similar)
• Experience with distributed batch processing frameworks (Spark or equivalent)
• Familiarity with distributed file systems (HDFS or equivalent) for large-scale data storage
• Experience with search infrastructure (Solr, Elasticsearch, or similar)
• Experience building systems that process structured feeds (RSS, Atom, or similar syndication formats)
• Familiarity with media delivery technologies (HLS, audio transcoding pipelines, or asset ingestion)
• Strong organizational skills and experience working on large cross-functional teams with diverse stakeholders (product, design, operations, business)

Responsibilities

• Own server-side systems that process data from millions of podcast providers, manage complex catalog state, and serve content to Apple's global audience.
• Build APIs consumed by other internal systems across Apple.
• Design database schemas for evolving content models.
• Architect asynchronous data pipelines that must operate reliably across multiple data centers.
• Collaborate with client teams, product, design, business, and operations partners to deliver end-to-end solutions.

What This Job Offers

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