Senior Backend Engineer, Apple News
Summary
Senior backend engineer on Apple's News team building distributed services and event-driven pipelines (Java/Spring, Kafka) that ingest, process, and serve news content at massive scale, while leading architecture decisions and mentoring other engineers.
The growing Apple Services group is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the InfoApps org to help shape what comes next for one of Apple's flagship content experiences. You'll join a close-knit, highly collaborative team where your work powers the apps used by hundreds of millions of users around the world.
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)