Software Engineer, Apple Ads

Apple • Cupertino, CA

1d

About The Position

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

Design, develop, and operate distributed backend services that support real-time ad selection. Architect low-latency, highly available, high-throughput ad-serving systems in a cloud environment; build secure, scalable data-processing pipelines for petabyte-scale datasets; and implement performant services handling high data volumes and query rates. Work across engineering, product, infrastructure, and partner teams to ensure suitable ads are available for real-time selection and to provide stakeholders with observability and flexibility.

The role focuses on candidate retrieval but offers opportunities to contribute across backend systems and apply algorithmic search, machine learning, NLP, and AI to retrieval problems. Write clean, efficient, documented code, participate in code reviews, and mentor other engineers. Collaborate with teams in indexing, search, serving, operations, and program management to define requirements and deliver high-quality solutions. The successful candidate is passionate about privacy-protective products and comfortable working in a fast-paced environment with changing priorities.

Requirements

• At least 3 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.
• 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 and ability to work effectively with technical and non-technical cross-functional teams, including operations and project management partners.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• Passion for building products that protect user privacy and ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment with rapidly changing priorities.

Nice To Haves

• Experience creating technology for algorithmic search, machine learning, natural language processing, or 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 to learn new technologies.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and operate distributed services for real-time ad selection.
• Architect and build low-latency, highly available, high-throughput ad-serving systems in a cloud environment.
• Engineer secure, scalable data-processing pipelines for petabyte-scale datasets.
• Implement performant services that handle very high data volumes and query rates.
• Collaborate across functions to ensure appropriate ads are available for real-time selection and to provide observability and flexibility for stakeholders.
• Contribute to candidate retrieval and other backend systems, potentially applying algorithmic search, machine learning, NLP, and AI.
• 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: Mid Level