Sr Automation & Intelligence Tools Engineer, SEAR

Apple • Cupertino, CA

9h

About The Position

SPEAR is a team of engineers working on security hardening across all of Apple's operating systems. We work in a lot of different codebases, at every layer of the stack, on features that ship to over a billion people without getting in their way. We're looking for a senior engineer to build the automation and intelligence tooling that lets us ship that work with confidence. You'll design the harnesses, infrastructure, and AI-assisted workflows that make correctness verifiable across iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS. Help us accelerate our security hardening work with the AI tooling to match its scale.

You'll join a multi-functional team covering every layer of the operating system - from apps to the kernel - working directly with feature engineers in SEAR and across the wider OS organization. Day to day, you'll decide where automation is worth building, then build it. You own the question of how this team proves that security-critical code does what it claims, without degrading the experience for our customers. You'll also help us work out what AI-native development looks like on a security team: where agents genuinely speed us up, and where we can't trust them yet.

Requirements

• Strong programming skills in Swift, Objective-C, or Python, with a track record of building tools, frameworks, or infrastructure that other engineers depend on.
• Experience designing and deploying automated verification at scale, including harnesses and CI systems.
• Real fluency with AI-assisted development. You use LLMs, coding agents, or tooling you've built yourself to get substantially more done, and you can explain how.
• Owned an ambiguous technical problem that crossed team boundaries and driven it to something that actually landed.
• Can explain a technical trade-off clearly enough to change a partner team's mind.

Nice To Haves

• Built agentic or LLM-backed developer tooling, such as evals, harnesses, MCP servers, or code-generation pipelines, and have opinions about where it holds up and where it falls over.
• Familiarity with XCTest, Xcode, and working in large shared codebases.
• Background in security, systems-level, or platform software.
• Experience setting test strategy: assessing risk, deciding what's worth covering, triaging and prioritizing.
• Curiosity about how systems work end to end, and the patience to find out.

Responsibilities

• Design the harnesses, infrastructure, and AI-assisted workflows that make correctness verifiable across iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS.
• Accelerate security hardening work with AI tooling.
• Decide where automation is worth building, then build it.
• Own the question of how this team proves that security-critical code does what it claims, without degrading the experience for our customers.
• Help work out what AI-native development looks like on a security team: where agents genuinely speed us up, and where we can't trust them yet.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed