Software Engineer, Apple Ads

Quick Facts

• Role: Software Engineer (Apple Ads)

Description

You will design, develop, and operate distributed backend services that enable real-time ad selection in a cloud environment. The work includes low-latency, high-availability, high-throughput ad-serving systems, secure and scalable data processing pipelines for petabyte-scale datasets, and services that handle very high QPS. You’ll collaborate across indexing, search, serving, operations, and program management, with opportunities to apply algorithmic search, ML, NLP, and AI to candidate retrieval and ranking.

Responsibilities

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

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

• Engineer secure, scalable distributed data pipelines for petabyte-scale indexing and retrieval

• Apply algorithmic search, machine learning, NLP, and AI to advance 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 and 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 experience architecting and developing internet-scale server software for Linux

• Strong algorithms and data structures fundamentals

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

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

• Experience with Lucene, Solr, or Elasticsearch

• Expertise with NoSQL datastores (e.g., Cassandra)

• Proficiency with Kafka, Spark, or Flink for petabyte-scale processing

• Experience with AWS (S3, EC2, EKS, Kubernetes)

• Strong problem-solving and debugging skills for distributed systems

• Ability to deliver complete systems end to end (independently and as part of a team)

• Strong written and verbal communication with cross-functional teams

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Benefits

• Work on highly performant backend systems at internet scale focused on real-time ad serving and privacy

• Opportunity to apply algorithmic search, machine learning, NLP, and AI to challenging retrieval problems