Software Engineer, Apple Ads

Quick Facts

• Role: Software Engineer (Ads)

• Focus: Backend systems for real-time ad selection and candidate retrieval

Description

Design, develop, and operate distributed services that enable real-time ad selection. Build low-latency, high-availability, high-throughput ad-serving systems in the cloud, along with secure, scalable data processing pipelines for petabyte-scale datasets. Collaborate across indexing, search, serving, operations, and program management to deliver correct, observable solutions at Apple scale, with flexibility to apply algorithmic search, machine learning, NLP, and AI to hard retrieval problems.

Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and implement internet-scale, low-latency, highly-available ad-serving systems in a cloud environment

• Build micro-services and distributed data platforms supporting high data volumes and QPS

• Engineer secure, scalable distributed data processing pipelines for indexing and retrieval

• Apply algorithmic search, machine learning, natural language processing, and AI to candidate retrieval and ranking

• Collaborate with internal teams to support indexing and searching use cases

• Partner with product managers, operations, SREs, and engineers to define requirements and deliver end-to-end systems

• Write clean, efficient, well-documented code; participate in code reviews

• Debug and resolve complex issues across large-scale distributed systems

• Stay current with advances in search, retrieval, distributed systems, ML/AI, and cloud infrastructure

Requirements

• 3+ years of industry experience architecting and developing internet-scale server software for Linux

• Strong computer science fundamentals (algorithms and data structures)

• Strong coding skills in Go, Java, Rust, C++, Scala, or a similar OOP/functional language

• Hands-on experience designing and operating scalable micro-services

• Search technologies experience (Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch)

• NoSQL datastore expertise (e.g., Cassandra)

• Data processing experience (e.g., Kafka, Spark, Flink) for petabyte-scale datasets

• AWS experience (S3, EC2, EKS/Kubernetes)

• Strong problem-solving and debugging skills for distributed systems

• Ability to deliver end-to-end systems independently or as part of a team

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with cross-functional teams

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Benefits

• Build real-time, internet-scale ad selection systems with a privacy-first mindset

• Flexibility to contribute across backend systems and apply ML/AI/NLP to retrieval challenges

• Work with product, operations, SREs, indexing/search/serving teams, and engineering partners