
Senior Software Engineer, Ads
Required skills
- OS fundamentals
- platform engineering
- cross-process communication
- concurrency
- on-device business logic
- privacy-by-architecture
- high-performance client SDKs
- libraries
- caching
- versioning
Nice to have
- Ad tech
- Apple-platform fundamentals
- Swift
- Objective-C
- public APIs
- SDKs
Role summary
Apple is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for its Ads Platforms group. This role focuses on building on-device systems that deliver ads across the Apple ecosystem, including OS daemons, frameworks, and SDKs. The position requires deep expertise in OS fundamentals, systems programming in C-like languages, cross-process communication, and concurrent programming. You will be responsible for designing and operating high-performance client SDKs, owning architecture for complex codebases, and mentoring other senior engineers. Experience with AdTech, Apple platforms, and public API design is preferred. This is a systems and platform engineering role, not a UI-focused position.
Description
We build the on-device systems that deliver ads across the Apple ecosystem: OS daemons, frameworks, and SDKs that fetch, rank and filter ad candidates; enforce ad policy and legal compliance; and protect user privacy before our partner apps even render anything. This is not a UI or app-building role: this is a systems and platform engineering position that requires working knowledge of cross-process communication, concurrency, on-device business logic, and privacy-by-architecture at scale.
Minimum Qualifications
Deep, expert-level understanding of OS fundamentals (process/memory management, scheduling, file systems), on any platform — Apple experience not required Extensive professional software development experience in a C-like language, including systems with significant scale and reliability requirements Expert-level understanding of cross-process communication and concurrent programming — multi-threading, synchronization, locking, and reasoning about races/deadlocks in production systems Track record of designing and operating high-performance client SDKs or libraries at scale — including caching, versioning, breaking changes, and feature-flagged rollouts, with demonstrated judgment on tradeoffs Demonstrated experience owning architecture and technical direction for complex, long-lived codebases, including legacy components, and driving multi-team initiatives to resolve structural issues in them Proven ability to operate with significant ambiguity, set technical direction without a playbook, and drive alignment across engineering, product, and business stakeholders History of mentoring and growing other senior engineers; excellent written and verbal communication, including with non-technical partners Bachelors Degree or equivalent experience.
Preferred Qualifications
Ad tech; Apple-platform fundamentals incl. Swift/Obj-C; designing/maintaining public APIs or SDKs for external developers; CoreData/libdispatch/XPC/Swift concurrency/daemons; telemetry/observability; client-server networking; experience setting technical strategy for a multi-team org
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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