Senior Backend Engineer, Apple News

Summary

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.

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• Design, Build and enhance highly-scalable backend services and data pipelines powering Apple News and related apps capable of serving thousands of requests-per-second
• Lead assigned projects end to end and deliver high-quality results on schedule
• Collaborate closely with a cross-functional team of engineers throughout the entire product lifecycle
• Develop event-driven architectures and messaging pipelines to support real-time data flows
• Lead and contribute technical decisions around NoSQL datastores, search infrastructure, and service design
• Utilize CI/CD tooling and version control systems to maintain code quality and deployment reliability

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)