
Senior Software Engineer, Apple Card & Savings
Required skills
- distributed systems
- production distributed systems
- on call
- distributed systems fundamentals
- idempotency
- retries
- timeouts
- consistency trade-offs
- Kotlin
- Java
Nice to have
- Spring
- JVM performance
- connection pools
- API contracts
- payments
- banking
Role summary
The Apple Card & Savings team is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, test, deliver, and operate distributed services for their financial products. This role requires strong experience in production distributed systems, a testing-first mindset, and proficiency in modern backend languages like Kotlin or Java. The engineer will be responsible for end-to-end ownership, operational excellence, and working within a highly regulated environment. Preferred qualifications include experience with Kotlin/Spring at high transaction volumes, payments/banking domains, cloud-native technologies, CI/CD, observability tools, event-driven architectures, and security fundamentals. Generative AI experience is also required.
Description
You'll design, build, test, deliver, and operate the distributed services that power Apple Card and Savings — from applications, accounts, and transactions to payments, savings transfers, rewards, and customer notifications. You'll be given the support of a talented team, access to modern technologies, and the autonomy to take full ownership of your work. Our team operates as DevOps: we build what we run. You'll be hands-on in every phase of the lifecycle — shipping changes safely through automated pipelines and controlled rollouts, participating in an on-call rotation, joining incident response and post-incident reviews, and automating away operational toil. You'll build reliable integrations with financial institution and payment network partners and with other Apple services such as Wallet, Apple Cash, and iCloud. As an experienced member of the team, you'll own features from specification through production, review code, contribute to technical design, write clear documentation, and help onboard and mentor teammates. Success in this role requires self-motivation, clear communication, a collaborative approach, and a commitment to engineering excellence and continuous improvement.
Minimum Qualifications
Solid experience building and operating production distributed systems, including services you have supported on call. Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including idempotency, retries, timeouts, and consistency trade-offs. Proficiency in a modern backend programming language (e.g. Kotlin, Java). Experience debugging production issues using logs, metrics, and traces, and following through on fixes and post-incident improvements. A testing-first mindset: experience writing thorough unit and integration tests as a natural part of development, and designing code with testability in mind. Clear written and verbal communication, including explaining technical issues to non-engineering stakeholders and external partners. No formal degree is required. What matters most is your mindset, your initiative, and your demonstrated ability to apply advanced skills to real-world applications. Experience using generative AI tools throughout the software development lifecycle to produce high-quality software.
Preferred Qualifications
Production experience with Kotlin and Spring at high transaction volumes, including tuning JVM performance, managing connection pools, and maintaining API contracts across multiple concurrent client versions. Experience in payments, banking, or other regulated financial domains, including data correctness (reconciliation, audit trails) and working within compliance, consumer-protection, and privacy requirements. Experience with containerized, cloud-native services (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, AWS), including multi-region resilience and failover. Experience with CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and safe release practices (e.g. canary deployments, feature flags, automated rollback). Experience with observability tools (e.g. Datadog, Splunk, OpenTelemetry), service level objectives (SLOs), and building actionable alerts that detect issues before customers or partners do. Experience with event-driven architectures and messaging (e.g. Kafka or equivalent event streaming) and with SQL/NoSQL databases at scale (e.g. Aurora, DynamoDB). Understanding of security and privacy fundamentals for protecting sensitive customer and financial data (e.g. mTLS, PKI and certificate lifecycle management, JWT).
Sample Apple interview questions
- 1
Design a typeahead box for a search engine
system designmedium - 2
Design a rate limiter
system designmedium - 3
Architect a key-value store for distributed systems.
system designmedium - 4
Design a system to schedule jobs in a distributed environment
system designmedium - 5
What is an API and how does it work?
technicalmedium
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