Software Engineering Technical Lead (Apple Card & Savings)

Quick Facts

• Role: Software Engineering Technical Lead for Apple Card & Savings

Description

Lead the architecture and evolution of distributed services powering Apple Card and Savings, combining hands-on engineering with operations ownership. Drive technical direction across teams, set service level objectives and safe progressive release standards, and lead large multi-quarter cross-team efforts through production. Represent Apple in technical discussions with external partners, mentor senior engineers, and raise the engineering bar with a focus on reliability and customer trust.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and operate mission-critical distributed services at large scale

• Lead multi-quarter engineering efforts, including complex integrations with financial institution and payment network partners

• Drive technical discussions across teams and organizations; author specifications and represent Apple in external partner negotiations

• Define and enforce service level objectives, progressive release strategies, and automation standards to reduce manual toil

• Lead incident response, extract operational learnings, and implement lasting architectural improvements

• Review code and designs; ensure systems are built for testability from the start

• Mentor senior engineers and shape engineering strategy and culture

• Define and champion standards for AI-assisted development to improve code quality and review throughput

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience architecting, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems at large scale

• Strong understanding of distributed systems trade-offs (consistency, latency, throughput) and data correctness patterns (idempotency, exactly-once processing, reconciliation)

• Expert hands-on software development skills in Kotlin or Java

• Extensive operational experience: incident response, defining SLOs, and turning learnings into architectural improvements

• Proven ability to lead complex cross-team projects from conception to production, including large migrations or platform changes

• Testing-first approach: design for testability; write tests as an integral part of development; define unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing strategy

• Experience using generative AI tools throughout the software development lifecycle to produce high-quality software

Benefits

• Opportunity to own critical systems end-to-end with autonomy and responsibility

• Work on mission-critical, large-scale distributed systems with strong technical mentorship and collaboration