Software Engineer; Distributed System

Santa Clara, California, United States Machine Learning and AI

At Apple, the information powering Siri, Spotlight, Apple Maps, and Apple Intelligence doesn't appear by magic — it's harvested at massive scale from the live web by a distributed crawl platform you'll help build and operate.

You'll join a small, high-impact team responsible for a system that continuously fetches, renders, and extracts structured knowledge from billions of web pages — feeding the intelligence layer behind Apple's most-used products.

The web crawl infrastructure you'll work on is a large-scale, distributed system that fetches, renders, and extracts structured knowledge from billions of web pages — powering Siri, Apple Intelligence, Spotlight, Apple Maps, and more. We're looking for an engineer who doesn't just build distributed systems but who leverages modern AI coding tools as a core part of their daily engineering workflow to move faster, write higher-quality code, and tackle more ambitious problems than traditional development cycles allow.

This is a deeply technical role embedded in a production platform with strict latency SLOs, complex failure domains, and high operational stakes. You'll work across the full crawl lifecycle, from how requests are scheduled and dispatched, to how pages are fetched and rendered, to how structured data is extracted and delivered downstream. As a member of this team, you will own the critical components of the systems and will be responsible for shaping the roadmap.

• BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• Strong understanding of data structures and algorithms.
• Strong systems programming background — Rust, Scala, or Go
• Experience building scalable distributed systems at the scale of billion ops.
• Solid understanding of async programming models, queue-based architectures, and at-least-once / exactly-once delivery semantics
• Deep expertise of Cloud infrastructure deployments, managing workloads across heterogeneous clusters (EKS and/or bare-metal)
• Familiarity with Kafka — topic management, consumer group lag, partition rebalancing
• Experience defining metrics, writing alert rules, and building dashboards for distributed services
• Excellent interpersonal skills able to work independently as well as cross-functionally

• Experience in Web Crawl is a plus
• Flink or Spark streaming/batch pipelines over Iceberg is a plus

At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $181,100 and $318,400, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.

Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs. Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan. You’ll also receive benefits including:
Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation.

Note:

Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant.