Software Engineering Technical Lead, Apple Card & Savings

Cary, North Carolina, United States Software and Services

The Apple Card & Savings team is building the financial products that put users in control of their money. We built Apple Card to reinvent how credit cards work, and we continue to launch groundbreaking features used by millions of people every day. We are looking for a technical lead who craves the challenge of architecting mission-critical systems at scale, sets technical direction across teams, and is equally at home in a design review, a production incident, or a technical negotiation with a financial partner.

You'll lead the architecture and evolution of the distributed services that power Apple Card and Savings, while staying hands-on in code and operations. You'll be given the flexibility to drive creative solutions, the support of a talented and driven team, and the autonomy and responsibility to take full ownership of critical systems.

Our team operates as Dev Ops: we build what we run. You'll shape the architecture of our platform through deep experience operating, monitoring, and supporting it on call, and you'll set the bar for how we ship and run software — safe, progressive releases, clear service level objectives, and automation over manual toil. You'll lead large, multi-quarter efforts — including complex integrations with financial institution and payment network partners and other Apple services — from conception through production, with reliability and customer trust as non-negotiables.

As a technical leader, you'll drive technical discussions across teams and organizations, write specifications, represent Apple in technical discussions with external partners, review code and designs, mentor senior engineers, and raise the engineering bar for the team. Success in this role requires strong self-motivation, crisp and clear communication, a highly collaborative approach, and the ability to define and influence engineering strategy well beyond your own team.

• Architect, build, and operate mission-critical distributed services that power Apple Card and Savings at large scale
• Lead large, multi-quarter engineering efforts — including complex integrations with financial institution and payment network partners — from conception through production
• Drive technical discussions across teams and organizations, authoring specifications and representing Apple in external partner negotiations
• Define and enforce service level objectives, progressive release strategies, and automation standards to eliminate manual toil
• Lead incident response, extract operational learnings, and translate them into lasting architectural improvements
• Review code and designs, raising the engineering bar and ensuring systems are built for testability from the outset
• Mentor senior engineers and shape the engineering strategy and culture of the broader team
• Define and champion the team's standards for AI-assisted development, evaluating and adopting tooling that measurably improves code quality and review throughput across the broader engineering org

• A demonstrated track record of architecting, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems at large scale, while remaining hands-on in code.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems trade-offs in consistency, latency, and throughput, and of data correctness patterns (e.g. idempotency, exactly-once processing, reconciliation).
• Expert hands-on software development skills in Kotlin or Java.
• Extensive operational experience: leading incident response, defining service level objectives (SLOs), and turning operational learnings into architectural improvements.
• A track record of leading complex,…