Software Engineering Technical Lead, Apple Card & Savings

The Apple Card u0026 Savings team is building the financial products that put users in control of their money. We built Apple Card to reinvent how credit cards work and we continue to launch groundbreaking features used by millions of people every day. We are looking for a technical lead who craves the challenge of architecting mission-critical systems at scale sets technical direction across teams and is equally at home in a design review a production incident or a technical negotiation with a financial partner.

Youll lead the architecture and evolution of the distributed services that power Apple Card and Savings while staying hands-on in code and operations. Youll be given the flexibility to drive creative solutions the support of a talented and driven team and the autonomy and responsibility to take full ownership of critical systems. nnOur team operates as DevOps: we build what we run. Youll shape the architecture of our platform through deep experience operating monitoring and supporting it on call and youll set the bar for how we ship and run software safe progressive releases clear service level objectives and automation over manual toil. Youll lead large multi-quarter efforts including complex integrations with financial institution and payment network partners and other Apple services from conception through production with reliability and customer trust as non-negotiables. nnAs a technical leader youll drive technical discussions across teams and organizations write specifications represent Apple in technical discussions with external partners review code and designs mentor senior engineers and raise the engineering bar for the team. Success in this role requires strong self-motivation crisp and clear communication a highly collaborative approach and the ability to define and influence engineering strategy well beyond your own team.

Architect build and operate mission-critical distributed services that power Apple Card and Savings at large scalenLead large multi-quarter engineering efforts including complex integrations with financial institution and payment network partners from conception through productionnDrive technical discussions across teams and organizations authoring specifications and representing Apple in external partner negotiationsnDefine and enforce service level objectives progressive release strategies and automation standards to eliminate manual toilnLead incident response extract operational learnings and translate them into lasting architectural improvementsnReview code and designs raising the engineering bar and ensuring systems are built for testability from the outsetnMentor senior engineers and shape the engineering strategy and culture of the broader teamnDefine and champion the teams standards for AI-assisted development evaluating and adopting tooling that measurably improves code quality and review throughput across the broader engineering org

A demonstrated track record of architecting building and operating mission-critical distributed systems at large scale while remaining hands-on in understanding of distributed systems trade-offs in consistency latency and throughput and of data correctness patterns (e.g. idempotency exactly-once processing reconciliation).nExpert hands-on software development skills in Kotlin or operational experience: leading incident response defining service level objectives (SLOs) and turning operational learnings into architectural track record of leading complex cross-team projects from conception to production including large migrations or platform changes and driving consensus with diverse audiences such as global teams and external testing-first approach to engineering: designing systems for testability from the outset writing tests as an integral part of development and defining testing strategy (unit integration contract end-to-end) for complex formal degree is required. What matters most is your mindset your initiative and your demonstrated ability to apply advanced skills to real-world using generative AI tools throughout the software development lifecycle to produce high-quality software.

Deep expertise with Spring and with high-volume REST and/or gRPC services (server-to-server or mobile client facing).nExperience in payments banking or other regulated financial domains including leading integrations with external financial partners and designing within compliance consumer-protection and privacy requirements (e.g. change management separation of duties PCI).nExperience architecting containerized cloud-native applications (e.g. Docker Kubernetes AWS) designed for multi-region resilience failover graceful degradation and self-healing and validated through load and failure designing CI/CD pipelines infrastructure as code and progressive release strategies (e.g. canary deployments feature flags automated rollback).nExperience defining observability strategy (e.g. Datadog Splunk OpenTelemetry) including business-level monitoring and high-quality alerts that detect issues before customers or partners with event-driven architectures and messaging (e.g. Kafka or equivalent event streaming) and optimizing SQL/NoSQL databases for scale (e.g. Aurora DynamoDB).nA strong understanding of security privacy and cryptography for protecting sensitive customer and financial data (e.g. mTLS PKI and certificate lifecycle management JWT).