Software Engineering Technical Lead, Apple Card & Savings

Apple•New York City, NY

19h

About The Position

The Apple Card & Savings team is seeking a hands-on technical lead to architect, build, and operate the distributed services powering Apple Card and Savings. The role sets technical direction across teams and owns the architecture and evolution of mission-critical systems at scale, including their design, implementation, and operations. The team operates as DevOps, building and running its own services. The technical lead shapes platform architecture through operational experience, monitoring, and on-call support, and establishes practices for safe progressive releases, service level objectives, and automation. The role leads large, multi-quarter efforts from conception through production, including complex integrations with financial institution and payment network partners and other Apple services, with reliability and customer trust as priorities. The technical lead drives discussions across teams and organizations, writes specifications, represents Apple in technical discussions with external partners, reviews code and designs, mentors senior engineers, and influences engineering strategy and culture beyond the immediate team. The role also defines standards for AI-assisted development and evaluates tools intended to improve software quality and review throughput.

Requirements

Demonstrated track record architecting, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems at large scale while remaining hands-on in code.
Deep understanding of distributed-systems trade-offs involving consistency, latency, and throughput, and data-correctness patterns such as idempotency, exactly-once processing, and reconciliation.
Expert hands-on software development skills in Kotlin or Java.
Extensive operational experience, including leading incident response, defining service level objectives, and translating operational learnings into architectural improvements.
Track record leading complex cross-team projects from conception to production, including large migrations or platform changes, and building consensus with diverse audiences such as global teams and external partners.
Testing-first approach: designing for testability, writing tests as part of development, and defining testing strategies for complex services.
Ability to apply advanced skills to real-world applications; no formal degree is required.

Nice To Haves

Experience using generative AI tools throughout the software development lifecycle to produce high-quality software.
Deep expertise with Spring and high-volume REST and/or gRPC services, whether server-to-server or mobile client facing.
Experience in payments, banking, or other regulated financial domains, including external financial-partner integrations and designing for compliance, consumer protection, and privacy requirements such as change management, separation of duties, and PCI.
Experience architecting containerized, cloud-native applications, such as Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS, for multi-region resilience, failover, graceful degradation, and self-healing, validated through load and failure testing.
Experience designing CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and progressive release strategies such as canary deployments, feature flags, and automated rollback.
Experience defining observability strategy using tools such as Datadog, Splunk, or OpenTelemetry, including business-level monitoring and high-quality alerts.
Experience with event-driven architectures and messaging such as Kafka or equivalent event streaming, and optimizing SQL/NoSQL databases for scale such as Aurora or DynamoDB.
Strong understanding of security, privacy, and cryptography for sensitive customer and financial data, including mTLS, PKI and certificate lifecycle management, and JWT.

Responsibilities

Architect, build, and operate mission-critical distributed services powering Apple Card and Savings at large scale while remaining hands-on in code.
Lead large, multi-quarter engineering efforts, including complex integrations with financial institution and payment network partners, from conception through production.
Drive technical discussions across teams and organizations, author specifications, and represent Apple in external partner discussions and negotiations.
Define and enforce service level objectives, progressive release strategies, and automation standards to reduce manual toil.
Lead incident response, identify operational learnings, and turn them into lasting architectural improvements.
Review code and designs, raise engineering standards, and ensure systems are designed for testability.
Mentor senior engineers and shape the broader team's engineering strategy and culture.
Define standards for AI-assisted development and evaluate and adopt tools that improve code quality and review throughput.
Define testing strategies for complex services, including unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing.
Define observability strategies, including business-level monitoring and alerts that detect issues before customers or partners do.