About the Role

Join our team and be a key architect in building the next generation of our core software systems! We're looking for a passionate Sr. Software Backend Engineer to create exceptional user experiences and scalable, well-architected solutions that drive our business forward. If you thrive on solving complex challenges and mentoring others, this is the place for you.

Description

• Drive a platform roadmap aligned with Apple Information Security (AIS) and product stakeholders.
• Execute company-wide live event (e.g., all-hands) meeting, exceeding SLAs.
• Clear reliability posture: multi-region DR, tested failover, run-books, and reduced MTTR.
• Demonstrable mentorship and cross-team impact: stronger design rigor, docs, and velocity.
• Internal Streaming/Media. Live and VOD workflows: ingest, encoder/transcoder orchestration, ABR ladders, packaging/manifest generation
• Secure internal distribution: entitlements by org/role, content classification, watermarking, and retention policies.
• Peak-event readiness: scaling strategies for all-hands and global broadcasts across mixed networks (office, home, VPN).

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end backend architecture: ingest, live/VOD encoding orchestration, packaging/manifest services, DRM/entitlements, playback APIs, and multi-region failover.
• Integrate with enterprise identity and policy: SSO (OIDC/SAML), audit trails, and policy enforcement for compliance and least-privilege.
• Engineer for peak events: capacity modeling, autoscaling, load shedding, graceful degradation, and DR playbooks that sustain company-wide concurrency spikes.
• Optimize delivery for enterprise networks: internal CDNs/edge caches, multi-CDN strategies, VPN-aware routing, caching, and bandwidth efficiency.
• Build reusable platform abstractions and APIs that enable comms, HR/training, and product teams to publish, schedule, and measure content safely and reliably.
• Partner with Security, IT/Networking, Client/Player, Data/Analytics, Compliance/Legal, and Comms to align roadmap and ensure policy, privacy, and accessibility (captions/ASR) are first-class.
• Lead incident response for live events; drive postmortems and systemic reliability improvements.
• Make build-vs-buy decisions and vendor integrations where appropriate; negotiate SLAs and own total cost of ownership.
• Mentor engineers, lead design reviews/RFCs, and elevate engineering standards across teams.

Minimum Qualifications

• Technical degree or equivalent experience building large-scale distributed backends.
• 10+ years building large-scale distributed backend systems.
• 8+ years of Java or equivalent experience in C/C++, Go, Scala, or similar programming languages.
• 5+ years of end-to-end live/VOD pipelines & video protection.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep experience with fault-tolerant distributed systems, multi-region architectures, idempotency, backpressure, and resiliency patterns (circuit breaking, bulkheads).
• Containers, orchestration, and IaC: Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform (or equivalent).
• Cloud proficiency (AWS): compute, networking, IAM, object storage; strong cost-awareness and capacity planning.
• AWS media services, such as AWS Live & AWS Media Package.
• Datastores and messaging: SQL and NoSQL (e.g., Oracle, DynamoDB, MongoDB), caching (Redis), and streams (Kafka/Pub/Sub).
• Enterprise identity and security: OAuth2/OIDC/SAML, RBAC/ABAC, token-based auth, encryption in transit/at rest, auditing.
• Strong observability and operational excellence: metrics/logs/traces (Open Telemetry), SLI/SLO/error budgets, on-call and incident management.
• Codecs/containers (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, AV1; MP4/fMP4) and live ingest protocols (SRT, RIST, RTMP).
• CDN and edge: internal cache hierarchy, multi-CDN switching, token auth, and cache-control for enterprise networks.
• Accessibility and compliance: captions, translations, WCAG; knowledge governance, e Discovery/legal hold.
• Data/analytics for QoE and engagement; familiarity with Hadoop/Ozone is a plus.
• Automation to reduce operational toil; practical use of GenAI to boost developer productivity within security constraints.
• Zero Trust networking concepts, device posture/attestation, and MDM integration.
• Experience with end-to-end live/VOD pipelines: ingest, transcode orchestration, ABR ladders, HLS/DASH packaging/manifests.
• Experience with enterprise video protection: DRM, entitlement/authorization.

Equal Opportunity

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant.