Backend Software Engineer - Camera & Photos Tools & AI Team

Cupertino, California, United States Software and Services

At Apple, new ideas have a way of becoming extraordinary products and experiences very quickly. Bring your passion and dedication to your job and there's no telling what you could accomplish.

Apple's Camera & Photos Tools & AI team is a tight-knit engineering team building the internal tools that power how the Camera, Photos, and Image Quality teams measure, evaluate, and improve the imaging experience on Apple products. Our software sits at the center of some of Apple's most demanding imaging workflows: it captures and catalogs enormous volumes of images and videos, orchestrates long-running analyses that characterize camera performance, and surfaces the results to the engineers and scientists who tune the hardware and software behind every photo our customers take.

We move quickly, care about the craft, and turn ambiguous problems into reliable, well-designed systems. You'll own backend services and data infrastructure end to end, from Python REST APIs to the model-serving infrastructure behind our AI-native tooling, partnering with engineering, science, and quality teams across Camera, Photos, and Image Quality. As AI capabilities advance rapidly, our team is actively building AI-native tooling, from integrating multimodal and vision models into image quality workflows to designing LLM-powered interfaces that let engineers query and interpret large datasets in natural language.

We want someone who doesn't just call a hosted API, but who can design, deploy, and operate the serving layer underneath it, and who holds AI-powered features to the same engineering bar as any other production code.

If you enjoy owning problems end-to-end, writing services that people rely on, and collaborating across disciplines, we'd love to talk to you.

We're seeking a versatile, technically strong Backend Software Engineer to design, build, and own backend infrastructure for imaging engineering and quality workflows across Camera, Photos, and Image Quality, building and operating Python REST API services, designing data models for enormous volumes of image and metadata records, and running and scaling asynchronous compute jobs, including the serving infrastructure for our AI/ML models.

The ideal candidate has a solid grasp of distributed-systems fundamentals and is comfortable owning a service from API design through production operation, writing code with an eye toward maintainability, correctness, and long-term operability, and is equally at home designing a new service, debugging a tricky async job, standing up model-serving infrastructure, or sitting with a partner team to understand what they actually need.

You hold AI-powered features to the same engineering standards as any other production code, and you treat cross-functional communication as a core part of the job.

• Design, deploy, and operate model-serving infrastructure for LLM integrations, agentic workflows, and vision pipelines, including hosting, versioning, monitoring, and cost/latency/accuracy tradeoffs across the service lifecycle, not just calling hosted third-party APIs.
• Develop prompt engineering strategies and retrieval-augmented systems (RAG) and the underlying vector storage/retrieval infrastructure that make internal image and metadata corpora accessible and actionable to partner teams.
• Evaluate, integrate, and maintain AI/ML models in production: monitoring for quality regression, managing model versions, and balancing cost, latency, and accuracy tradeoffs across the service lifecycle.
• Develop and maintain Python REST API backends and data models/storage for large-scale image, video, and metadata catalogs, including endpoints that kick off, monitor, and scale long-running asynchronous jobs.
• Partner with engineers, scientists, and quality leads across Camera, Photos, and Image Quality to translate their workflows into reliable backend services.
• Drive the reliability, performance, and observability of services other teams depend on; contribute to technical design, code review, and cross-team planning.

• BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience shipping production backend systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python, with a track record of owning production backend services end to end.
• Strong understanding of REST API design and experience building and operating production REST services at scale.
• Demonstrated experience hosting and serving AI/ML models (LLMs, vision models, or similar) in production, including infrastructure for inference, scaling, and monitoring, not just integrating third-party hosted APIs.
• Working knowledge of asynchronous job execution patterns (background workers, task queues, or similar) for long-running computations, and experience scaling these systems under load.
• Solid understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals: consistency, coordination, failure…