Sr. Software Engineer / Backend, Employee Experience & Productivity

Apple

About The Position

Join our team and be a key architect in building the next generation of our core software systems! We're looking for a passionate Sr. Software Backend Engineer to create exceptional user experiences and scalable, well-architected solutions that drive our business forward. If you thrive on solving complex challenges and mentoring others, this is the place for you. Description Drive a platform roadmap aligned with Apple Information Security (AIS) and product stakeholders.Execute company-wide live event (e.g., all-hands) meeting, exceeding SLAs.Clear reliability posture: multi-region DR, tested failover, run-books, and reduced MTTR.Demonstrable mentorship and cross-team impact: stronger design rigor, docs, and velocity.Internal Streaming/Media. Live and VOD workflows: ingest, encoder/transcoder orchestration, ABR ladders, packaging/manifest generation Secure internal distribution: entitlements by org/role, content classification, watermarking, and retention policies.Peak-event readiness: scaling strategies for all-hands and global broadcasts across mixed networks (office, home, VPN).

Requirements

Technical degree or equivalent experience building large-scale distributed backends.
10+ years building large-scale distributed backend systems.
8+ years of Java & API development.
5+ years of end-to-end live/VOD pipelines & video protection.

Nice To Haves

Deep experience with fault-tolerant distributed systems, multi-region architectures, idempotency, backpressure, and resiliency patterns (circuit breaking, bulkheads).
Containers, orchestration, and IaC: Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform (or equivalent).
Cloud proficiency (AWS): compute, networking, IAM, object storage; strong cost-awareness and capacity planning.
AWS media services, such as AWS Live & AWS Media Package.
Datastores and messaging: SQL and NoSQL (e.g., Oracle, DynamoDB, MongoDB), caching (Redis), and streams (Kafka/Pub/Sub).
Enterprise identity and security: OAuth2/OIDC/SAML, RBAC/ABAC, token-based auth, encryption in transit/at rest, auditing.
Strong observability and operational excellence: metrics/logs/traces (OpenTelemetry), SLI/SLO/error budgets, on-call and incident management.
Codecs/containers (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, AV1; MP4/fMP4) and live ingest protocols (SRT, RIST, RTMP).
CDN and edge: internal cache hierarchy, multi-CDN switching, token auth, and cache-control for enterprise networks.
Accessibility and compliance: captions, translations, WCAG; knowledge governance, eDiscovery/legal hold.
Data/analytics for QoE and engagement; familiarity with Hadoop/Ozone is a plus.
Automation to reduce operational toil; practical use of GenAI to boost developer productivity within security constraints.
Zero Trust networking concepts, device posture/attestation, and MDM integration.
Experience with end-to-end live/VOD pipelines: ingest, transcode orchestration, ABR ladders, HLS/DASH packaging/manifests.
Experience with enterprise video protection: DRM, entitlement/authorization.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end backend architecture: ingest, live/VOD encoding orchestration, packaging/manifest services, DRM/entitlements, playback APIs, and multi-region failover.
Integrate with enterprise identity and policy: SSO (OIDC/SAML), audit trails, and policy enforcement for compliance and least-privilege.
Engineer for peak events: capacity modeling, autoscaling, load shedding, graceful degradation, and DR playbooks that sustain company-wide concurrency spikes.
Optimize delivery for enterprise networks: internal CDNs/edge caches, multi-CDN strategies, VPN-aware routing, caching, and bandwidth efficiency.
Build reusable platform abstractions and APIs that enable comms, HR/training, and product teams to publish, schedule, and measure content safely and reliably.
Partner with Security, IT/Networking, Client/Player, Data/Analytics, Compliance/Legal, and Comms to align roadmap and ensure policy, privacy, and accessibility (captions/ASR) are first-class.
Lead incident response for live events; drive postmortems and systemic reliability improvements.
Make build-vs-buy decisions and vendor integrations where appropriate; negotiate SLAs and own total cost of ownership.
Mentor engineers, lead design reviews/RFCs, and elevate engineering standards across teams.

Benefits

Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition.
Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation.

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