Software Engineer - Universal Media

Summary

Apple Services Engineering (ASE) teams power the App Store, Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Apple Books, Fitness+, the iTunes Store, and more. We do this on a significant scale, delivering a huge variety of software in over 35 languages to more than 150 countries. Our engineers build secure, end-to-end solutions. They develop the custom software used to process all the creative work, the tools that providers use to deliver that media, all the server-side systems, and the APIs for many Apple services. Thanks to Apple's unique integration of hardware, software, and services, engineers here partner to get behind a single unified vision. That vision always includes a deep commitment to strengthening Apple's privacy policy, one of Apple's core values. Although Services are a bigger part of Apple's business than ever before, our teams remain small, nimble, and highly cross-functional, offering greater exposure to the array of opportunities here.

Description

What happens when the world’s most innovative engineers collaborate with the world’s most creative storytellers? TV gets reinvented. Meet the re-inventors: Apple Services' Video Engineering (ASE Video). ASE Video teams have embarked on a journey to build the next-generation sports and media experience. In the ASE Video teams, we work every day to create products that enrich people’s lives. The teams build and manage the Apple TV app as well as tvOS, which redefined and refined the way people watch movies, TV shows, sports, and so much more. The ASE Video group is looking for a Software Engineer to join our Universal Media Engineering team. The Universal Media Engineering team leads the data platform and related tools that power the Apple TV app. We are looking for enthusiastic, self-starting individuals who can bring new ideas and innovations to the platform and push the boundaries of scalability, latency and quality. Does this sound like you? If so, we want to speak with you. As a Software Engineer, you will be responsible for designing and building services that directly impact millions of users. You'll collaborate closely with a diverse set of teams that include engineering, project management, business operations, design and curation, working towards a common vision of delivering the best possible Apple TV experience for our customers. Our engineers employ their talent and tools to write the code that makes these experiences possible. They work multi-functionally with teams across Apple to build a seamless experience. This group is seeking a highly skilled Backend Engineer to help design, develop, and deliver new experiences for our customers. Join the team to see what else is possible!

Responsibilities

• Partner with data scientists to productionize and deploy personalization algorithms, ensuring models are scalable, reliable, and performant in production environments.
• Design and build data pipelines to generate and process large-scale datasets used for personalization and user targeting initiatives.
• Develop and maintain systems for delivering timely, personalized notifications to users across multiple channels.
• Monitor and optimize production systems for latency, throughput, and reliability, implementing improvements as usage scales.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with data scientists, product managers, and other engineers to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Contribute to code reviews, technical design discussions, and engineering best practices to raise the overall quality and health of the codebase.

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years building resilient, high-scale distributed microservices in production (serving millions of users or comparable event/request volume)
• Proficiency in Java or another object-oriented language
• Production experience designing and operating event-driven / streaming systems (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, Pulsar) — pub/sub, async, or stream processing at scale
• Hands-on experience building large-scale data pipelines on a big-data framework (e.g., Apache Spark)
• Experience productionizing personalization / recommendation / ranking algorithms — deploying, serving, and monitoring them in a live system (not offline training only)
• Experience building or operating notification / message-delivery systems across one or more channels (push, email, SMS, in-app)
• Proficient in algorithms and data structures
• Experience with SQL & NoSQL datastores (e.g., PostgreSQL, Cassandra, DynamoDB, MySQL) and Redis
• Bachelor’s degree in CS, CE, EE, or a related technical field — or equivalent industry experience
• Effective written and verbal communication; able to make progress with incomplete requirements

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience partnering directly with data scientists to move models from notebook to production
• Feature stores, online/offline serving, model monitoring, and A/B experimentation
• Multi-channel delivery at scale — rate-limiting, dedup, and delivery-guarantee design
• Experience with CI/CD and cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Advanced stream/data processing (e.g., Flink, Beam, Spark Structured Streaming)
• Master’s degree in a related technical field