Backend Engineer (Python)

Do you love understanding every detail of how new technologies work? Join the team that serves as Apple’s nerve center, our Information Systems and Technology group. There are countless ways you’ll contribute here, whether you’re coordinating technology needs for product launches, designing music solutions for retail locations, or ensuring the strength of in-store Wi-Fi connections. From Apple Pay to the Apple website to our data centers around the globe, you’ll help design and manage the massive systems that countless employees and customers rely on every day. You’ll also build custom tools for employees, empowering them to solve complex problems on their own. Join our team, and together we’ll explore all the ways to improve how Apple operates, freeing our employees to do what they do best: craft magical experiences for our customers

AI & Data Platforms (AiDP) is IS&T's engine for AI-powered innovation. The team brings together data, application development, and machine learning — including generative AI — along with data services and customer success functions, to help IS&T build solutions more efficiently and streamline the adoption and embedding of generative AI across Apple.

Description

As a Software Engineer, you will be responsible for building Apple’s AI Data and ML platforms. You will either work on building custom solutions ground up or take open source products and customize the same for Apple’s need. We're looking for an individual who loves to take challenges, tackles problems with imaginative solutions, works well in collaborative teams, and can produce high-quality software under tight deadlines and constraints. This role involves building innovative tools and frameworks that can extend across different platforms within AiDP.

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 3+ years of overall experience in software/platform development
• Strong programming skills with proficiency in Python (and ideally in one or more additional languages like Typescript, Java, Golang etc).
• Experience architecting AI systems on cloud platforms.

Preferred qualifications

• Strong communication skills to conduct discovery with customers and to convey technical concepts to diverse stakeholders.
• Knowledge of LLM serving and inference frameworks.
• 1+ years of experience shipping production-grade AI-driven solutions to external or internal customers.
• Hands-on experience with frameworks like Langchain/LangGraph, CrewAI, or AutoGen.

Experience in applied AI, with a focus on building systems around pretrained models (e.g., prompt engineering, fine-tuning, Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agent orchestration).

• Ability to implement secure agentic workflows incorporating MCP, tool-calling, and OAuth-based authentication.
• Data Structures & Algorithms: Foundation and application experience.
• Distributed Systems: Understanding and hands-on experience managing at least one distributed system (e.g. Hadoop, Kafka, Spark, Flink etc. ).
• Problem Solving: Demonstrated ability to independently troubleshoot and resolve complex technical issues.