Senior Platform Software Engineer - AI & Data Platforms

Summary

The people here at Apple don’t just build products — they build the kind of wonder that’s revolutionized entire industries. It’s the diversity of those people and their ideas that encourages the innovation that runs through everything we do, from amazing technology to industry-leading environmental efforts. Join Apple, and help us leave the world better than we found it. Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, extraordinary ideas have a way of becoming industry leading products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. Bring passion and dedication to your job and there's no telling what you could accomplish. Our engineers develop and maintain Apple’s relational database platform — hosting PostgreSQL databases that power some of Apple’s most important workloads across Services, Manufacturing, AIML, and beyond. You’ll join a team building the automation layer that makes this possible: secure, API-driven services that manage the full lifecycle of database clusters at scale. This is product engineering — you’ll ship the platform that highly-visible Apple services depend on, and your work will directly impact reliability for millions of users worldwide. AI & Data Platforms (AiDP) is IS&T's engine for AI-powered innovation. The team brings together data, application development, and machine learning — including generative AI — along with data services and customer success functions, to help IS&T build solutions more efficiently and streamline the adoption and embedding of generative AI across Apple.

Minimum Qualifications

5+ years of software development experience Experience building highly available software services or platform infrastructure Experience designing, building, and maintaining API-driven micro services Proficient in Python or optionally Java, Kotlin, or C/C++ Bachelor's in Computer Science or Computer Engineering or equivalent work experience

Preferred Qualifications

Experience building and interacting with Cloud APIs (AWS, GCP) Experience working with relational databases Good understanding of PostgreSQL internals Experience supporting PaaS or DBaaS at scale Familiarity with observability platforms (Prometheus/Grafana, Splunk, or equivalent) Experience with AI/ML tooling — LLM APIs, RAG pipelines, AI agent frameworks, or integrating ML inference into production services

Description

The team develops highly reliable, API-driven micro services to manage the full lifecycle of PostgreSQL databases at Apple: provisioning, scaling, patching, failover, and decommissioning, while ensuring deep observability, durability, and automation for our customers. Maintaining and enhancing monitoring and alerting is equally important for the role. Understanding core reliability concepts - observability, monitoring, alerting, fault tolerance, auto-remediation and a drive to push the boundaries of what’s automatable will help you succeed here.

Responsibilities

Automation Development: Design and build tools to streamline database management tasks and performance tuning. Integrate AI/ML capabilities into areas like intelligent configuration recommendations, workload-aware scheduling, and LLM-powered interfaces that simplify complex operator workflows API-Driven Services: Design, build, and maintain secure, versioned micro services that expose database lifecycle operations as APIs. Ensure correctness under concurrent execution, handle partial failures gracefully, and evolve the API surface to support new capabilities without breaking existing consumers Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Integrate database management automation into CI/CD pipelines with automated testing, canary rollouts, and rollback capabilities Monitoring and Alerting: Develop and enhance monitoring, alerting, and health-check systems that give both the platform team and customers deep visibility into database health. Build self-healing mechanisms that detect and remediate known failure patterns automatically.