What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Software Engineer - Observability position at Apple, Inc.?
Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, new ideas have a way of becoming extraordinary products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. Apple Pay and Wallet are at the heart of how millions of people around the world make payments, store credentials, and interact with commerce every day. Behind every tap, every transaction, and every boarding pass is a set of systems that must be fast, reliable, and secure at massive scale. We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Wallet, Payments, and Commerce (WPC) team and help define how we build, observe, and operate these critical systems. In this role, you will design and develop the observability platforms, reliability tooling, and AI-powered automation that empower WPC engineering teams to ship with confidence, resolve issues in real time, and deliver seamless experiences to hundreds of millions of users.
Apple Pay processes billions of transactions across millions of merchants worldwide. The systems behind Apple Pay, Apple Wallet, Apple Cash, Tap to Pay, and our commerce platforms must meet the highest standards for availability, latency, security, and correctness - with zero tolerance for downtime or data loss.\n\nThis is a software engineering role within one of Apple's most critical and high-scale service organizations. You will bring strong design and architecture skills to solve complex problems at the intersection of payments infrastructure, observability, DevOps tooling, and AI - and you will ship production-quality software that WPC teams depend on to keep Apple Pay running for customers around the world.
7 years of experience in software engineering with a strong emphasis on building backend systems, platforms, and tooling\nProven experience building observability or reliability tooling such as monitoring systems, alerting platforms, log pipelines, tracing infrastructure, or diagnostic tools. Deep technical understanding of the Otel ecosystem, including configuring Collectors, SDKs, and Exporters. Proven experience integrating telemetry data with Grafana and Datadog\nStrong proficiency in Kotlin, Go, Python, or Java, with Kotlin experience highly valued\nDeep understanding of distributed systems concepts including data pipelines, event-driven architectures, API design, and service-to-service communication\nExperience designing systems that handle high-throughput data ingestion and processing such as telemetry pipelines, streaming systems, or transaction processing platforms\nSolid understanding of datastores and their trade-offs - relational databases, NoSQL, time-series databases, caching layers, and message brokers\nWorking knowledge of production infrastructure concepts including containers, Kubernetes, cloud platforms, networking fundamentals, and CI/CD systems\nExperience with observability platforms and standards such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Splunk, or similar\nHands-on experience with LLMs and AI APIs - building integrations, agents, or automation pipelines that solve real operational problems\nExperience building internal developer tools, platforms, or CLIs that are adopted and used daily by engineering teams\nFamiliarity with SRE practices including SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident management, and post-incident review\nStrong software design skills - you write clean, well-tested, maintainable code and care deeply about system architecture\nExcellent communication and collaboration skills with the ability to lead design reviews and drive technical alignment across teams.\nBS or MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
Experience working on payment systems, financial services platforms, or other high-compliance, high-availability domains\nExperience applying AI/ML to operational problems such as anomaly detection, transaction pattern analysis, log summarization, automated diagnostics, or intelligent alerting\nFamiliarity with security and compliance considerations in financial and payment systems (PCI-DSS, tokenization, encryption at rest and in transit)\nExperience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform or Pulumi as a tooling builder\nExperience building systems that require strong correctness guarantees - idempotency, exactly-once processing, auditability, and data integrity at scale
Apple Pay processes billions of transactions across millions of merchants worldwide. The systems behind Apple Pay, Apple Wallet, Apple Cash, Tap to Pay, and our commerce platforms must meet the highest standards for availability, latency, security, and correctness - with zero tolerance for downtime or data loss.\n\nThis is a software engineering role within one of Apple's most critical and high-scale service organizations. You will bring strong design and architecture skills to solve complex problems at the intersection of payments infrastructure, observability, DevOps tooling, and AI - and you will ship production-quality software that WPC teams depend on to keep Apple Pay running for customers around the world.
7 years of experience in software engineering with a strong emphasis on building backend systems, platforms, and tooling\nProven experience building observability or reliability tooling such as monitoring systems, alerting platforms, log pipelines, tracing infrastructure, or diagnostic tools. Deep technical understanding of the Otel ecosystem, including configuring Collectors, SDKs, and Exporters. Proven experience integrating telemetry data with Grafana and Datadog\nStrong proficiency in Kotlin, Go, Python, or Java, with Kotlin experience highly valued\nDeep understanding of distributed systems concepts including data pipelines, event-driven architectures, API design, and service-to-service communication\nExperience designing systems that handle high-throughput data ingestion and processing such as telemetry pipelines, streaming systems, or transaction processing platforms\nSolid understanding of datastores and their trade-offs - relational databases, NoSQL, time-series databases, caching layers, and message brokers\nWorking knowledge of production infrastructure concepts including containers, Kubernetes, cloud platforms, networking fundamentals, and CI/CD systems\nExperience with observability platforms and standards such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Splunk, or similar\nHands-on experience with LLMs and AI APIs - building integrations, agents, or automation pipelines that solve real operational problems\nExperience building internal developer tools, platforms, or CLIs that are adopted and used daily by engineering teams\nFamiliarity with SRE practices including SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident management, and post-incident review\nStrong software design skills - you write clean, well-tested, maintainable code and care deeply about system architecture\nExcellent communication and collaboration skills with the ability to lead design reviews and drive technical alignment across teams.\nBS or MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
Experience working on payment systems, financial services platforms, or other high-compliance, high-availability domains\nExperience applying AI/ML to operational problems such as anomaly detection, transaction pattern analysis, log summarization, automated diagnostics, or intelligent alerting\nFamiliarity with security and compliance considerations in financial and payment systems (PCI-DSS, tokenization, encryption at rest and in transit)\nExperience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform or Pulumi as a tooling builder\nExperience building systems that require strong correctness guarantees - idempotency, exactly-once processing, auditability, and data integrity at scale