Software Engineering Technical Lead, Apple Card & Savings

Apple•New York, NY

About The Position

The Apple Card & Savings team is building financial products that put users in control of their money. The team created Apple Card and continues to launch features used by millions of people. The Technical Lead will architect and evolve the distributed services powering Apple Card and Savings while remaining hands-on in code and operations. The role owns critical systems and sets platform architecture and engineering direction. The team operates as DevOps, building and running its services. The lead will use operational experience, monitoring, and on-call support to shape the platform and establish standards for safe, progressive releases, clear service level objectives, and automation. The role also leads large, multi-quarter initiatives, including complex integrations with financial institution and payment network partners and other Apple services, from conception through production, with reliability and customer trust as priorities. The technical leader will drive discussions across teams and organizations, write specifications, represent Apple in technical discussions with external partners, review code and designs, mentor senior engineers, and raise the team's engineering standards. Success requires self-motivation, clear communication, collaboration, and the ability to define and influence engineering strategy beyond the immediate team.

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 in 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 driving consensus with global teams and external partners.
Testing-first engineering approach, including designing for testability, writing tests as part of development, and defining unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing strategies.
Experience using generative AI tools throughout the software development lifecycle to produce high-quality software.
Strong self-motivation, clear communication, and collaborative approach, with the ability to define and influence engineering strategy beyond one's team.

Nice To Haves

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 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 alerts designed to detect issues before customers or partners do.
Experience with event-driven architectures and messaging such as Kafka or equivalent event streaming, and optimizing SQL/NoSQL databases for scale such as Aurora and DynamoDB.
Strong understanding of security, privacy, and cryptography for protecting sensitive customer and financial data, including mTLS, PKI and certificate lifecycle management, and JWT.

Responsibilities

Lead the architecture and evolution of distributed services powering Apple Card and Savings while remaining hands-on in code and operations.
Own critical systems and shape platform architecture through operating, monitoring, and supporting services on call.
Set engineering standards for safe, progressive releases, service level objectives, and automation.
Lead large, multi-quarter efforts, including complex integrations with financial institutions, payment networks, and other Apple services, from conception through production.
Drive technical discussions across teams and organizations and write specifications.
Represent Apple in technical discussions with external partners.
Review code and designs, mentor senior engineers, and raise the engineering bar for the team.
Lead incident response, define service level objectives, and turn operational learnings into architectural improvements.
Lead complex cross-team projects, including large migrations and platform changes, and drive consensus with diverse audiences.
Design systems for testability and define testing strategies for complex services.