Software Engineering Technical Lead, Apple Card & Savings
Technical lead on Apple's Apple Card & Savings team in Cary, NC: architects and operates mission-critical distributed financial services at scale while staying hands-on in Kotlin/Java, leads multi-quarter integrations with financial partners, mentors engineers, and owns DevOps, observability, and progressive delivery practices.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Cary
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Lead
- Employment
- Contract
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Track record architecting, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems at large scale while remaining hands-on in code
- Deep understanding of distributed systems trade-offs (consistency, latency, throughput) and data correctness patterns (idempotency, exactly-once processing, reconciliation)
- Expert hands-on software development skills in Kotlin or Java
- Extensive operational experience: leading incident response, defining SLOs, turning operational learnings into architectural improvements
- Track record leading complex, cross-team projects from conception to production, including large migrations or platform changes, and driving consensus with diverse audiences
- Testing-first approach: designing for testability, writing tests as part of development, defining testing strategy (unit, integration, contract, end-to-end)
- Experience using generative AI tools throughout the software development lifecycle
- No formal degree required; mindset, initiative, and demonstrated ability to apply advanced skills to real-world applications matter most
Nice to have
- Deep expertise with Spring and high-volume REST and/or gRPC services
- Experience in payments, banking, or other regulated financial domains, including integrations with external financial partners and compliance requirements (change management, separation of duties, PCI
- Experience architecting containerized, cloud-native applications (Docker, Kubernetes, AWS) for multi-region resilience, failover, graceful degradation, and self-healing
- Experience designing CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and progressive release strategies (canary deployments, feature flags, automated rollback)
- Experience defining observability strategy (Datadog, Splunk, OpenTelemetry) including business-level monitoring and high-quality alerts
- Experience with event-driven architectures and messaging (e.g. Kafka) and optimizing SQL/NoSQL databases for scale (e.g. Aurora, DynamoDB)
- Strong understanding of security, privacy, and cryptography for protecting sensitive financial data (mTLS, PKI and certificate lifecycle management, JWT)
Full description
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 DevOps: 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.
Minimum Qualifications
- 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, cross-team projects from conception to production — including large migrations or platform changes — and driving consensus with diverse audiences such as global teams and external partners.
- A testing-first approach to engineering: designing systems for testability from the outset, writing tests as an integral part of development, and defining testing strategy (unit, integration, contract, end-to-end) for complex services.