Senior Software Engineer, Ads Backend (Real-Time Ad Serving)

Quick Facts

• Role: Senior Software Engineer focused on Apple Ads backend (real-time ad selection/retrieval)

Description

Design, develop, and operate distributed services enabling real-time ad selection. Architect and build low-latency, high-availability, high-throughput ad-serving systems in a cloud environment, and engineer secure, scalable data processing pipelines for petabyte-scale datasets. Collaborate across indexing, search, serving, operations, and program management to ensure correct ads are available for real-time selection, with observability and flexibility for stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate distributed services for real-time ad selection

• Architect and build low-latency, high-availability, high-throughput ad-serving systems

• Engineer secure and scalable data processing pipelines at petabyte scale

• Implement performant services handling high data volumes and QPS

• Ensure correctness and availability of ads for real-time selection

• Provide observability and flexibility for stakeholders

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

• Collaborate cross-functionally to define requirements and deliver production solutions

Requirements

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

• Strong CS 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 microservices

• Experience with search technologies: Lucene, Solr, or Elasticsearch

• Expertise with NoSQL datastores such as Cassandra

• Proficiency with data processing technologies such as Kafka, Spark, Flink for petabyte-scale datasets

• Experience with AWS services such as S3, EC2, and EKS/Kubernetes

• Strong problem-solving and debugging skills

• Ability to deliver complete end-to-end systems, alone or in a team

• Excellent written and verbal communication; effective collaboration with technical and non-technical cross-functional partners

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Benefits

• Opportunity to build and operate privacy-focused, internet-scale advertising backend systems

• Flexibility to contribute across a variety of backend systems, including potential work using algorithmic search, machine learning, NLP, and AI for retrieval problems

• Mentoring and code review collaboration within the Ads Engineering team