Quality Engineer, Retail Demo Experiences

Summary

Imagine what you could do here! The people here at Apple don’t just create products — they build the kind of wonder that’s revolutionized entire industries. It’s the diversity of those people and their ideas that inspires the innovation that runs through everything we do, from amazing technology to industry-leading environmental efforts. At Apple, inclusion is a shared responsibility, and we work together to foster a culture where everyone belongs and is inspired to do their best work.

We’re a diverse collective of thinkers and doers, continuously reimagining our products and practices to help people do what they love in new ways. That innovation is inspired by a shared commitment to great work — and to each other. Because learning from the people here means we’re learning from the best. Retail Operations creates the tools and programs that empower our teams to provide, a one of a kind, only at Apple experience. We do this by obsessing over the employee and customer experience, and driving a global strategy that sets the bar.

The Retail Technology, QA Engineering team owns quality standards, strategy and execution for customer facing interactive apps and systems. Our stack spans AV hardware, interactive players, device targeting logic, demo apps, content management systems, content bundles, SDKs and experience frameworks. We compose all of this into innovative, scaleable customer demo experiences worldwide.

Description

We are seeking a Sr. Quality Engineer to own strategy and execution across a portfolio of applications and systems deployed to Apple Stores worldwide. You will design and drive automated test coverage across this portfolio while maintaining a healthy balance of exploratory testing. In partnership with engineers, you will influencing testability and observability early in the design process to build in quality from the start.

Responsibilities

• Define a quality strategy across the portfolio — native or web apps and clients, backend services, SDKs and frameworks — and execute consistently against high standards
• Design, author, and maintain automated test coverage as a merge gate within CI. Build XCUITest and XCTest suites for clients, browser and API automation for services, and contract tests where clients and CMS integrate.
• Partner with engineering on testability from the start. Shape feature flag design, test hooks and harnesses, staging fidelity, and instrumentation while a feature is being designed — so quality is built in early.
• Validate every app version against the content, services and OS release they depend on. Catch regressions across permutations of these dependancies.
• Report release-readiness clearly to cross-functional and leadership stakeholders. Translate coverage, defect trends, and staged-rollout signal into a confident go, no-go, or rollback recommendation.

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years in software quality engineering, test automation, or software development.
• Demonstrated technical leadership defining quality strategy across a full product surface spanning multiple native clients, backend services and delivery pipelines. Track record partnering with engineers to influence architecture, quality practices (feature flag programs, test hooks, staging fidelity) across partner organizations and mentoring QA engineers.
• Proven experience testing native iOS and macOS applications end to end on managed Apple devices (XCUITest/XCTest authoring, app lifecycle and state restoration, log analysis and triage). Quality ownership for a multi-platform client family, including app version compatibility matrix and the content or services they depend on.
• Proficient in Swift and Python with the ability to build and maintain automation, debug and extend client apps and backend services under test.
• Proven experience testing web applications and backend services end to end, including API and contract testing, browser automation (e.g. Playwright), and data-driven validation across a CMS and its clients.
• Experience testing asynchronous, distributed workflows — job orchestration, retries and idempotency, partial failure, and eventual consistency (e.g. Temporal, Airflow, or equivalent).
• Skilled in root-causing failures across multiple system boundaries, spanning netowrking, client, service, content layers etc.
• Comfortable working in a trunk-based / mainline development environment, driving confidence through CI coverage, feature flags, and staged rollout rather than a release-candidate handoff.
• Serve as the go/no-go decision maker for user-acceptance, production-validation testing and customer-facing releases.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and version control (Jenkins, GitHub, Docker/Kubernetes, Ansible, Rundeck), including running automated client and service suites as a merge gate.
• BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Client performance profiling with instruments — memory footprint, launch time, and rendering behavior on long-running unattended devices.
• Experience testing client behavior under degraded or offline network conditions, including content caching and recovery.
• Working knowledge of observability tooling (e.g. Splunk, Datadog) — able to define what a feature should log, not only consume existing dashboards.
• Test data and environment management — mirroring production data into lower environments, seeding realistic content, and reasoning about staging fidelity.
• Accessibility and multi-locale validation for customer-facing applications.
• Excellent written and verbal communication. Able to report quality and release-readiness status clearly to cross-functional and leadership stakeholders.