
Senior Backend Engineer, Apple News
Required skills
- scalable
- maintainable
- testable
- backend systems
- Java
- Spring
- distributed backend services
- event-driven architectures
- pipelines
- data stores
Nice to have
- technical lead
- team of engineers
- architecture
- engineering quality
- distributed NoSQL databases
- Apache Cassandra
Role summary
Apple Services is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer for the InfoApps organization to contribute to Apple News and related apps. The role involves building scalable, distributed, and event-driven backend services and pipelines for content ingestion, processing, and serving. Responsibilities include leading projects from design to launch, defining architecture, data modeling, ensuring system reliability, and driving technical decisions across teams. The position emphasizes using modern tools, including AI-assisted development, and requires strong problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills. Experience with Java, Spring, data stores, and event-driven architectures is essential.
Description
As a senior backend engineer on this team, you'll build the distributed services and event-driven pipelines that ingest, process, and serve content at massive scale to support Apple News and related apps. You'll lead projects from design through launch: defining architecture, modeling data for performance and growth, and making sure systems stay reliable in production. Beyond your own code, you'll drive technical decisions across partner teams, and use modern tools, including AI-assisted development, to raise the bar for how the team builds software.
Minimum Qualifications
Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or similar technical discipline (or equivalent relevant experience) 5-10 years of demonstrated experience in shipping scalable, maintainable, and testable backend systems Strong background in Java and Spring for backend service development Demonstrated ability to design and build high-scale, distributed backend services with event-driven architectures and pipelines (e.g., Kafka) Solid experience with data stores, including data modeling and schema design for production systems Track record of strong problem-solving abilities in complex technical environments Effective use of AI-assisted development tools to speed up design, coding, and testing with high quality Strong communication and collaboration skills in a team-oriented environment
Preferred Qualifications
Proven experience as the technical lead for a team of engineers - setting architecture and direction, mentoring others, and raising the bar for engineering quality Hands-on experience with distributed NoSQL databases, especially Apache Cassandra, including query-driven data modeling, partitioning, and performance tuning. Experience in search technologies such as Apache Solr Experience with CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins) and build tools (e.g., Gradle, Bazel)
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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