Profiling Tools Engineer (Xcode Instruments) - Developer Experience

Summary

The Profiling Tools team is looking for engineers with a passion for optimization to lead new capabilities end-to-end: what gets built, how it works, and what ships to millions of developers across iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. Core responsibilities include improving runtime data collection, analysis, and visualization in Apple's Developer Tools ecosystem.

Apple's Developer Tools group provides the foundation that developers worldwide rely on to design, write, build, debug, profile, and deploy software. It's a uniquely rewarding area – where engineers own not just the implementation, but the direction – and where the people using what you build are other developers, turning ambitious ideas into shipped products.

The Profiling Tools team primarily focuses on the debugging and profiling aspects of the development process, using runtime analysis techniques to instrument and introspect software to understand and improve it. The team is responsible for tools such as Instruments, xctrace, and on-device components performing low-level data capture. Tools for analyzing app behavior, improving responsiveness, and minimizing power/memory consumption are critical to making great user experiences across Apple's platforms.

About the role

With every new technology, framework, or product, there's a need for tools that can expose important underlying system behaviors. As a result, a strong passion for learning is essential. You'll need to work effectively with Apple teams of different engineering disciplines, anticipate problems early, and communicate ideas clearly. An ideal candidate will be able to drive development projects independently, collaborating with other teams to solve tough engineering challenges, and iteratively developing and integrating solutions to complex problems.

Explore our work

Curious about what the Profiling Tools team ships? The best way to understand what this team builds is to watch what we've shipped at WWDC: From helping developers debug and profile agentic app experiences and find and fix performance issues in Metal games, to enabling them to profile, fix, and verify app responsiveness and optimize SwiftUI and CPU performance with Instruments — these sessions reflect the kind of engineering challenges you'd take on.

Browse recent Instruments sessions on the Apple Developer portal

Minimum Qualifications

• 3+ years of macOS or iOS development experience
• Expertise in Swift/Objective-C
• Strong problem-solving and debugging skills
• Understanding of Operating System fundamentals

Experience in computer science or a related field commensurate with a 4-year degree

Preferred Qualifications

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Software profiling and optimization background
• Passion for using or improving development tools
• Ability to analyze and visualize core concepts of new technologies

Familiarity with agentic programming paradigms and AI-integrated development workflows