staff-level Software Engineer

Retail Engineering Foundations builds and operates the platform services that power Apple Retail’s data and application infrastructure, tooling used across retail systems, with a focus on reliability, consistency, and scalability. As a staff-level Software Engineer on this team, you will architect, design, develop, test, document, improve, and maintain code mostly in Java (and other languages as needed), partaking in every aspect of your projects from planning through implementation and future iterations, with an extended role in designing solutions and leading software projects.

B.S. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional work experience.

8+ years proven experience developing software in a professional capacity. Longer experience strongly preferred.

4+ years proven experience with Java, including mastery in concurrency, memory management, and performance optimization techniques.

Mastery in OOP principles, data structures, algorithms, and software design patterns (e.g. GoF), with a proven focus on implementing testable, maintainable, and extensible backend code.

Experience building production applications with the Spring ecosystem (e.g. Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring Data, Spring Cloud, etc.), including mastery in dependency injection, auto-configuration, reactive programming with WebFlux, and designing microservices using Spring-based patterns.

Experience with cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, etc.), including mastery in IaC, containerization, and orchestration using industry-standard tools (e.g. Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.).

Experience designing, implementing, and shipping high-scale, high-performance, highly available, fault-tolerant, and secure cloud-based distributed systems.

Experience with message-driven and event-driven architectures, including mastery in messaging systems (e.g. Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, etc.), event sourcing, CQRS patterns, and designing reliable asynchronous communication between distributed services.

Experience using relational (e.g. Oracle, Postgres, MySQL, etc.) and NoSQL (e.g. Cassandra, MongoDB, etc.) databases, including mastery in schema design, query optimization, performance tuning (e.g. execution plan analysis, indexing strategy, and query rewriting), and understanding of database transaction foundations across systems.

Preferred Qualifications

Track record of leading software projects that span multiple, distributed teams as a tech lead (TL), while mentoring senior-level software engineers.

Hands-on experience leveraging GenAI coding tools (e.g., Claude, Copilot, Codex) to accelerate the software development lifecycle, enhance code quality, and streamline debugging and testing processes.

Experience with search and indexing technologies (e.g. Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, etc.), including designing search architectures, index optimization, query tuning, and implementing full-text search for large-scale datasets.

Expert-level expertise in observability and monitoring, including implementing comprehensive solutions using modern tools (e.g. Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, APM platforms, CloudWatch, etc.) for large-scale distributed systems.

Expert-level knowledge of networking concepts, protocols, and infrastructure (e.g. HTTP/HTTPS, TCP/IP, CDN, load balancing, edge computing, DNS, Zero Trust architecture, etc.).

Expert-level understanding of advanced JVM internals (e.g. garbage collection, memory allocation, JIT, JNI, etc.).

Experience in API design and implementation, including mastery in RESTful API principles, gRPC, GraphQL, contract-first design (e.g. OpenAPI/Swagger, Protobuf, etc.), API versioning strategies, gateway patterns, rate limiting, and designing APIs for backward compatibility and long-term evolution.

Do you want to help build some of the largest and most consequential enterprise and customer technology systems in the world? Join Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization.

IS&T is the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. It’s Apple’s central nervous system. Supporting 2.5 billion active Apple devices, processing billions of secure transactions, and keeping the technology that defines modern life running flawlessly, IS&T makes the impossible feel effortless.

Retail and Marcom Engineering, an IS&T team, builds and operates the systems and experiences that connect Apple’s products with its customers. The team owns the technology behind both Apple’s online and physical stores and drives the interactive marketing experiences and tools that keep creative operations moving. Together, those functions deliver the technology behind every product story Apple tells and every purchase a customer makes.