Java Backend Engineer - Retail Engineering

Summary

Apple is a place where extraordinary people gather to do their best work. Together we craft products and experiences people once couldn’t have imagined — and now can’t imagine living without. Do you want to help build some of the largest and most consequential enterprise and customer technology systems in the world? Do you want to help build some of the largest and most consequential enterprise and customer technology systems in the world? Join Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization. IS&T is the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. It’s Apple’s central nervous system. Supporting 2.5 billion active Apple devices, processing billions of secure transactions, and keeping the technology that defines modern life running flawlessly, IS&T makes the impossible feel effortless.Do you love building solutions to handle global complexity and immense scale? Imagine what you could do here. Retail and Marcom Engineering, an IS&T team, builds and operates the systems and experiences that connect Apple's products with its customers. The team owns the technology behind both Apple's online and physical stores and drives the interactive marketing experiences and tools that keep creative operations moving. Together, those functions deliver the technology behind every product story Apple tells and every purchase a customer makes.

Minimum Qualifications

8 years of professional software engineering experience, with strong experience in Java backend development. Extensive experience building production applications using Spring Boot and Spring Framework. Strong understanding of REST APIs, microservices, distributed systems, and backend design patterns. Hands-on experience with MongoDB, including data modeling, indexing, query optimization, and performance considerations. Strong experience with Kafka or equivalent event-streaming platforms. Hands-on experience with Redis or other caching technologies. Experience with Akamai, CDN, reverse proxy, edge caching, or similar traffic-management technologies.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience designing and operating high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems. Experience with AWS services, including EC2, EKS, ALB, CloudWatch, S3, ElastiCache, or equivalent services. Experience with Redis/Valkey, cache invalidation strategies, TTL management, distributed caching, and cache failure scenarios. Strong understanding of Kafka architecture, including partitioning, replication, ordering, consumer lag, rebalancing, retries, and exactly-once/at-least-once processing. Experience with MongoDB replication, sharding, indexing, aggregation pipelines, and high-volume workloads. Experience with Akamai CDN, edge caching, traffic routing, bot management, WAF, or related edge technologies. Experience with observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Splunk, Datadog, or CloudWatch. Knowledge of application and API security, including OAuth2, JWT, TLS, OWASP, authentication, authorization, and secure API design. Experience with Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, GitOps, or infrastructure-as-code practices. Experience building event-driven and asynchronous architectures. Experience with performance engineering, load testing, capacity planning, and production tuning. Familiarity with Generative AI, LLM-based developer tools, AI-assisted software development, or agentic workflows is a plus. Experience working in large-scale engineering organizations with globally distributed teams is a plus.

Description

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, developing, and delivering scalable backend services using modern Java and cloud-native technologies. You will work across the complete software development lifecycle — from requirements and technical design through implementation, testing, deployment, production operations, and continuous improvement. The role requires strong expertise in distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, caching, databases, API design, performance optimization, and production reliability. You will also contribute to technical design discussions, mentor engineers, participate in code and architecture reviews, and help establish engineering best practices across the team.

Responsibilities

Design and develop highly scalable and reliable backend services using Java and Spring Boot. Build and maintain RESTful APIs and microservices following modern backend engineering practices. Design distributed systems capable of handling high traffic, large data volumes, and demanding latency requirements. Work with MongoDB and other data stores to design efficient data models, indexes, queries, and persistence strategies. Develop and maintain Kafka-based event-driven systems, including producers, consumers, topics, partitions, consumer groups, retries, and failure handling. Design and optimize caching solutions using Redis or equivalent technologies to improve application performance and scalability. Work with Akamai/CDN and edge technologies to optimize content delivery, traffic management, caching, security, and application performance. Design solutions for high availability, fault tolerance, resiliency, disaster recovery, and graceful degradation. Analyze application and infrastructure performance and identify opportunities for optimization. Participate in production operations, incident management, root-cause analysis, and service reliability improvements. Own features and services throughout the complete SDLC, from technical design through production deployment and support. Collaborate with product managers, architects, QA engineers, DevOps/SRE teams, and other cross-functional stakeholders. Conduct code reviews and provide constructive technical feedback to improve code quality and engineering practices. Mentor junior and mid-level engineers and contribute to technical knowledge sharing. Champion automation, CI/CD, testing, observability, and modern software engineering practices. Contribute to architectural decisions and technical roadmaps for backend platforms. Identify opportunities to simplify systems, reduce operational complexity, and improve engineering productivity.