Senior Software Engineer, Ad Tech (Ads Platform Backend)

Quick Facts

• Role: Senior Software Engineer (Ads Platform Backend), specializing in candidate retrieval for real-time ad selection

• Focus: Low-latency, high-availability, high-throughput ad-serving systems in a cloud environment

Description

Design, develop, and operate distributed services that enable real-time ad selection. Architect and build low-latency, highly available, high-throughput ad-serving systems, plus secure and scalable data processing pipelines for petabyte-scale datasets. Apply algorithmic search, machine learning, NLP, and AI to advance candidate retrieval and ranking, collaborating across indexing, search, serving, operations, and program management.

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 processing pipelines for petabyte-scale indexing and retrieval

• Use algorithmic search, ML, NLP, and AI to improve candidate retrieval and ranking

• Collaborate with internal teams on indexing and search use cases

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

• Deliver complete systems from design through production, independently and as a team

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

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

• Mentor engineers and contribute to engineering best practices

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

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience architecting and developing internet-scale server software for Linux systems

• Strong computer science fundamentals (algorithms and data structures)

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

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

• Search experience with Lucene, Solr, or Elasticsearch

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

• Data processing experience with Kafka, Spark, Flink for petabyte-scale datasets

• AWS experience: S3, EC2, and EKS/Kubernetes

• Strong problem-solving and debugging skills for distributed systems

• Ability to deliver complete end-to-end systems

• Excellent written and verbal communication with cross-functional partners

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Benefits

• Build privacy-focused advertising infrastructure across App Store, Apple News, Stocks, and Apple TV

• Flexible opportunities to contribute beyond candidate retrieval across backend systems

• Work in a fast-paced environment with rapidly changing priorities