Core Data and Intelligence (CDI) is the central data, AI, and machine learning engineering team in ASE Media. We build the primitives other teams rely on: privacy-compliant data collection, canonical datasets, AI and machine learning building blocks, and the visualizations that turn them into decisions. That work shows up across Apple. It is a signal for Music recommendations, a report on the engagement of a new TV+ feature, and the Average Revenue Per User we share with developers. We partner with client and server teams to source data and ensure collection meets Apple's high privacy standards. CDI also leads privacy engineering within ASE. Apple Services Engineering powers App Store, Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Apple Books, Fitness+, the iTunes Store, and more.
The Data Engineering Platform (DEP) is how CDI does that work at scale. DEP builds an opinionated data engineering ecosystem that accelerates data and machine learning engineers. It includes spec-driven development, data quality, AI-driven workflows, cloud portability, CI/CD, integrated privacy and compliance, and scaled operational tooling.
We are looking for a Senior Platform Software Engineer to build and evolve the foundations of DEP. You will work across the full depth of the stack, from the command an engineer types to the infrastructure running in production. You will build foundational developer and platform systems, take direct responsibility for critical production services, and establish engineering patterns that scale across DEP.
Description
As a Senior Platform Software Engineer on DEP, you will build systems end to end: the API, the service, the schema, the configuration, the pipeline, and the telemetry. You will combine hands-on engineering with systems thinking, building the foundations that make data and machine learning engineers more productive.
* Design, build, and operate the Go services at the heart of DEP, and shape the declarative APIs and interfaces engineers build against
* Define how services ship on the platform, establishing patterns and abstractions for deployment, configuration, release, and lifecycle that services and partner teams can build on
* Drive operational excellence for critical production services, including service-level objectives, observability and alerting, release safety, availability, and recovery as adoption grows
* Shape the developer experience across command-line tooling, project scaffolding, APIs, and documentation. Run onboarding, gather feedback from data engineering teams, and turn recurring friction into product improvements
* Design and evolve core data and persistence models, establishing durable schemas, contracts, and interfaces with clear patterns for compatibility, migration, and evolution
* Develop reusable AI-assisted engineering workflows and establish patterns for how skills and agents are built, evaluated, shared, and maintained across the team
* Shape technical direction by defining engineering standards, evaluating emerging technology, mentoring engineers, and building strong relationships with engineering teams and customers to inform priorities and investments
Minimum Qualifications
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience
6+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building complex backend services and distributed systems
Strong programming fundamentals, with a track record of shipping and operating production backend services and developer-facing tools
Experience designing durable APIs, schemas, or developer-facing interfaces with attention to compatibility and evolution
Demonstrated experience with CI/CD and release engineering, including promotion between environments and safe rollback
Strong relational database fundamentals, including schema design, indexing, transactions and isolation levels, and managed schema migrations in production services
Solid distributed systems fundamentals, including the ability to reason about reliability, consistency, failure modes, and operational tradeoffs
Experience operating production services, including observability, on-call, incident response, and post-incident improvement, with a track record of raising the reliability and maintainability of systems you inherit
Strong written and verbal communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to work effectively across teams and communicate technical decisions clearly
Preferred Qualifications
Experience building infrastructure, developer platforms, or developer-facing systems
Experience with infrastructure-as-code systems such as Terraform or OpenTofu, including building reusable abstractions or operating infrastructure tooling at scale
Experience with policy-as-code or configuration-as-code technologies such as Open Policy Agent, Rego, PKL, CUE, Jsonnet, or comparable systems
Experience building CLI or terminal-based developer tools used as part of engineers' daily workflows
Experience with observability technologies such as OpenTelemetry, including instrumentation, dashboards, alerting, and service-level indicators
Hands-on depth with relational database systems such as PostgreSQL or CockroachDB
Experience with artifact or package distribution systems, including concepts such as versioning, immutability, provenance, signing, or registry protocols
Experience developing reusable skills, agents, or workflows for AI-assisted development tools and helping drive their adoption across an engineering team
Exposure to data governance, privacy engineering, security, or compliance-driven requirements, and experience partnering with privacy and security teams
Experience serving other engineering teams, with an understanding of multi-tenancy, blast radius, shared ownership models, compatibility, and deprecation
Strong developer empathy, with a track record of engaging engineering customers through onboarding, documentation, office hours, and other feedback channels
