
Senior Software Platform Engineer, Apple Pay
Required skills
- Go
- Java
- Kotlin
- C++
- Kubernetes
- cloud
- production backend
- infrastructure systems
- API design
- concurrency
Nice to have
- Kubernetes controllers
- Kubernetes operators
- custom resource design
- schema versioning
- Pkl
- CUE
Role summary
Apple is seeking a Senior Software Platform Engineer for its Apple Pay team. This role involves building and operating the internal developer platform used by engineering teams within the Wallet, Payments and Commerce organization. Responsibilities include designing APIs, writing production code, and ensuring the performance and correctness of critical systems. The platform supports the full software development lifecycle, from service creation to production operations, under strict privacy, security, and compliance requirements. The ideal candidate will have strong backend or infrastructure systems experience, proficiency in statically typed languages like Go, Java, Kotlin, or C++, and experience with distributed systems, Kubernetes, and cloud providers.
Description
This is a software engineering role on the team that builds the platform itself. The primary output is design and code. You will design the APIs, write the production code behind them, and own the performance and correctness of systems that engineering teams across the organization depend on daily.
Minimum Qualifications
6+ years building and operating production backend or infrastructure systems. Strong programming ability in Go, or in Java, Kotlin, C++ or a comparable statically typed language, with solid fundamentals in API design, concurrency and error handling. A real testing practice. You write tests that would catch a regression rather than tests that restate the implementation. Distributed systems experience covering idempotency, eventual consistency, retries and partial failure, plus practical performance work where you profiled something and measured the fix. Working knowledge of Kubernetes and extensive cloud experience with at least one of the major cloud providers. Excellent written and verbal communication, including design documents and incident write-ups that other engineers can act on.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience writing Kubernetes controllers or operators in production, including custom resource design and schema versioning. Experience with declarative configuration and templating systems such as Pkl, CUE, Jsonnet, Kustomize or Helm, or with infrastructure as code such as Terraform. Extended experience in at least one of: GitOps and progressive delivery, developer platforms and internal tooling, multi-region and disaster recovery, observability, or regulated environments such as PCI. Fluency with coding agents and LLM-based development tooling, and judgment about when to trust their output. Ability to coach and mentor other ICs, and to lead a design review to a decision.
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
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