Staff Software Engineer - Java Backend - Customer Engagement Platform for Apple Services

Summary

The role is in Apple Services Engineering (ASE) in London. ASE is the team behind high-profile services such as Apple iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Arcade and more. We are seeking an accomplished staff software engineer to architect and build the software for our customer engagement platform, powering message orchestration across Apple Services at global scale.

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Description

The ASE Customer Engagement engineering team is responsible for building the platform that enables communicating with millions of customers every day, across services such as Apple iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, Apple Fitness+, Apple Wallet and more. In this team, you will be responsible for designing, building, improving and maintaining server-side applications that process requests at phenomenal scale, with low latency and high availability.

These applications transform and optimise self-service configurations (including campaigns and signals) maintained by operations teams using tooling for runtime execution. At runtime, they orchestrate customer messaging to millions of users with sophisticated targeting, personalisation and A/B testing across Apple Services.

Responsibilities

Working with our Product and Design teams to define what we're building, investigate technical feasibility, break down the work and lead its delivery.

Driving cross-organisational architectural alignment. Authoring design proposals, reconciling competing constraints, driving consensus across a diverse group of engineering partners.

Implementing and operating highly-distributed mass-scale systems. Owning deployments and observability.

Identifying opportunities to reduce complexity, improve stability, lower operational cost.

Extracting product and platform capabilities. Promoting standardisation and reusability across the engineering organisation.

Making fact-driven technical decisions and presenting them at architecture and leadership reviews.

Mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar across the team.

Championing the adoption of new technologies and best engineering practices, including effective and responsible use of GenAI and agents.

Working with our QA and SRE teams to establish reliability and quality goals.

Minimum Qualifications

Strong Java backend skills and solid computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, distributed systems.

Experience designing and building loosely coupled, eventually consistent distributed systems.

Experience driving complex, cross-team projects end-to-end.

Strong written and verbal communication across technical and non-technical partners.

Preferred Qualifications

Recent Java backend experience with SQL, NoSQL, event queues and container orchestration.

Background in messaging, customer engagement, audience targeting, growth platforms, or push/email delivery.

Experience leading multi-quarter initiatives across engineering organisations.

Bias towards reducing complexity, including sunsetting systems and simplifying integrations.

Comfort making technical decisions and shipping in ambiguous, evolving environments.

Using AI agents fluently in your day-to-day development workflow.

At Apple, we're not all the same. And that's our greatest strength. We draw on the differences in who we are, what we've experienced and how we think. Because to create products that serve everyone, we believe in including everyone. Therefore, we are committed to treating all applicants fairly and equally. As a registered Disability Confident employer, we will work with applicants to make any reasonable accommodations. Apple will consider for employment all qualified applicants with criminal backgrounds in a manner consistent with applicable law. Learn more

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Role Number: 200653641-2114