Data Engineer, Apple Ads

New York City, New York, United States Software and Services

At Apple, we build products and services that enrich people’s lives. Apple Ads helps customers discover relevant products and content while enabling developers, publishers, and advertisers to grow their businesses. Privacy is fundamental to how we design and build our advertising platform. The Apple Ads engineering organization operates large-scale data systems that process and transform high-volume advertising events into reliable datasets and products used for reporting, measurement, analytics, and other critical business functions.

We are looking for a Software Engineer with strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building large-scale distributed data processing systems. In this role, you will design, develop, and operate production data pipelines using technologies such as Apache Spark, Kafka, Java/Scala, cloud storage, and modern data lake technologies. You will work on challenging problems involving large-scale batch and streaming data processing, data correctness, privacy, reliability, scalability, and performance.

You will have opportunities to own systems end-to-end—from architecture and implementation through deployment, observability, and production support.

As a Software Engineer on the Apple Ads data engineering team, you will help build the next generation of scalable data processing and reporting infrastructure. You will design and implement distributed data pipelines that process large volumes of advertising events across batch, near-real-time, and streaming execution environments. You will work on systems where correctness, data quality, performance, reliability, and privacy are critical.

The ideal candidate is a strong software engineer who also has hands-on experience with Apache Spark and large-scale data processing. You should be comfortable reasoning about distributed systems, debugging complex data pipelines, optimizing Spark workloads, designing data models, and building production-quality software around big-data processing frameworks. You will collaborate with engineers, product teams, data scientists, SREs, and other cross-functional partners to translate business and technical requirements into scalable data solutions.

• Design, develop, and operate large-scale distributed data processing pipelines using Apache Spark and related big-data technologies.
• Build reliable batch, near-real-time, and streaming pipelines for processing high-volume advertising and measurement data.
• Develop production-quality software primarily using Java, Scala, and/or Python.
• Design scalable data architectures for processing and storing very large datasets.
• Build pipelines using technologies such as Spark, Kafka, S3/object storage, Apache Iceberg, Hadoop, and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Develop efficient data transformations, aggregations, joins, and data-processing algorithms over large datasets.
• Analyze and optimize Spark applications for performance, memory utilization, shuffle efficiency, parallelism, and compute cost.
• Design systems that gracefully handle late-arriving data, retries, partial failures, reprocessing, and evolving data schemas.
• Build strong data-quality controls, validation mechanisms, reconciliation frameworks, and monitoring to ensure correctness throughout the data lifecycle.
• Design systems with privacy, security, and appropriate data‑handling principles built into the architecture.
• Develop observability, metrics, alerting, and debugging capabilities for production data pipelines.
• Investigate and resolve complex issues across distributed compute, storage, orchestration, and downstream data systems.
• Participate in architecture and design reviews and contribute to technical decisions for evolving the data platform.
• Write clean, maintainable, well‑tested code and participate actively in code reviews.
• Own services and pipelines through their complete lifecycle, including design, development, deployment, monitoring, and production support.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional engineering and product teams to deliver scalable solutions for Apple Ads.

• 3+ years of…