Staff/Sr. Software Engineer, AI, Search & Knowledge Platforms

Apple • Santa Clara, CA

2d

About The Position

Our team builds the foundational systems that power search across Apple - from Siri to Apple Music to the App Store and beyond. We develop agentic orchestration frameworks, configuration management infrastructure, services and APIs that enable product teams to deliver fast, reliable, and intelligent search experiences to hundreds of millions of users. We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to design and build the distributed systems that underpin search at Apple scale. You will work at the intersection of large-scale backend infrastructure and agentic orchestration — creating frameworks that coordinate complex, multi-step search workflows across services. Your work will directly impact how quickly and reliably Apple products can deliver search results to users worldwide. As part of a platform team, you will have the opportunity to work with many other teams across the organization and across the company. You will also participate in many key technical decisions that will shape the future of search at Apple.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, focusing on backend development
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Go, Rust, C++ or Java is required
• Deep understanding of distributed systems — consensus, fault tolerance, consistency models, and graceful degradation
• Experience designing and operating large-scale backend services (high QPS, low-latency requirements)
• Track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives from design through delivery
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Strong focus on collaboration and collaborative problem solving

Nice To Haves

• Experience building orchestration or workflow execution frameworks (e.g., DAG-based execution engines, agent-based systems, or task schedulers)
• Familiarity with configuration management at scale — feature flagging, dynamic config propagation, rollout safety
• Experience with search or information retrieval systems
• Exposure to agentic AI patterns — tool use, planning, multi-agent coordination
• Contributions to platform or infrastructure teams where your users are other engineers

Responsibilities

• Design and build distributed systems that underpin search at Apple scale.
• Work at the intersection of large-scale backend infrastructure and agentic orchestration.
• Create frameworks that coordinate complex, multi-step search workflows across services.
• Impact how quickly and reliably Apple products can deliver search results to users worldwide.
• Work with many other teams across the organization and across the company.
• Participate in key technical decisions that will shape the future of search at Apple.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees