Developer Platform Engineer - Operational Events and Data (UK)

At Apple, great ideas quickly become phenomenal products, services, and customer experiences. Apple Pay has brought the Apple Wallet to millions of customers worldwide, enabling them to carry digital credentials such as credit and debit cards, transit passes, hotel and car keys, theme park tickets - and now, mobile driver’s licences - all in their Apple Wallet. Building and scaling these products requires not just world-class engineering, but a deep understanding of how institutions around the world operate, implement standards, and protect user data and privacy.

As a Developer Platform Engineer, you will have the opportunity to tackle the intricate challenge of building resilient and reliable distributed software systems at Apple's scale, enabling the next generation of services powering Apple Pay. The role is a hands‑on contributor to our internal developer platform. You will navigate the layers between application, platform, cloud, and infrastructure engineering. Our solutions are shaped by deep understanding of the problems which will inform what we build in the platform. We follow principles of platform‑as‑a‑product, cloud-native and devops and our success is measured by adoption.

The ultimate goal of our platform is to modernise the technical stack and the engineering culture in our organisation. That’s why we are building a platform that is opinionated and makes it easy to do the right thing. Our team focuses on near‑real‑time, event‑driven micro services and OLTP workloads with global scale. Our use cases range from customer‑facing to internal back‑office backend services. This role may require occasional international travel.

Description

In this hands‑on role, you will have a particular focus on:

• Data for microservices: transactional storage and event‑driven architectures. This extends to data governance, data contracts, and compliance as native solutions in our platform.
• Product advocacy for the platform itself: identify the opportunities across different solutions, assess whether a platform solution would bring value and work on the delivery of this. Our objective is to pursue a platform‑as‑a‑product delivery.
• Problem solving with hands‑on, evidence‑based and example‑based decisions. Sometimes this means getting familiar with technologies you did not know before.
• Proposing and delivering on platform best practices. We are transforming diverse and varied architectures into unified opinionated solutions, preferably based on Kubernetes operators.
• Tactical work at the relevant layer: infrastructure, cloud, platform or application level. You will be able to work with the right toolstack for the problem in front of you. That could mean GoLang for Kubernetes Operator or a Kotlin application library. We don’t expect perfect knowledge everywhere but the ability to leverage the most appropriate tool.
• Guiding foundational and architectural design and delivery - including education, documentation, examples and collaborative delivery. Our work must be approachable by our colleagues and actionable in AI workflows.

Minimum Qualifications

• Demonstrable experience of or strong interest in transforming engineering practices.
• A solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals and cloud native solutions.
• An ability to communicate thoughtfully and clearly, both verbally and in writing, to discuss complex technical concepts with diverse audiences, in order to drive from solution to delivery. Demonstrate problem solving as a team.
• A track record of building and sustaining healthy long‑term relationships within your team and beyond its boundaries, including global teams and external partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• You don’t have to tick all or even most of these, as long as you can demonstrate the ability to pick them up:
• Practical experience with an internal developer platform or application frameworks.
• Demonstrable experience of working on a data mesh or an event mesh or similar architectures.
• Experience as an advocate for CI/CD, DevOps, DORA metrics and similar best practices and familiarity with pipelines and infrastructure as code.
• Familiarity or hands‑on curiosity with our technical stack and its major components: AWS, Java, Kotlin, GoLang, gRPC, Data Science tools like Iceberg, Spark, Flink, SQL/NoSQL databases.
• An appreciation for, and understanding of security, privacy, governance along with their relevant implementations.
• Passion for shaping developer platforms that are as accessible to AI agents as they are to humans, paired with hands‑on use of generative AI in day‑to‑day engineering work.

At Apple, we're not all the same. And that's our greatest strength. We draw on the differences in who we are, what we've experienced and how we think. Because to create products that serve everyone, we believe in including everyone. Therefore, we are committed to treating all applicants fairly and equally. As a registered Disability Confident employer, we will work with applicants to make any reasonable accommodations. Apple will consider for employment all qualified applicants with criminal backgrounds in a manner consistent with applicable law.

At Apple, we believe accessibility is a fundamental human right. You’ll find that idea reflected in everything here — in our culture, our benefits and our digital tools. By welcoming as many perspectives as possible, we help you build a career where you feel like you belong.