Senior Software Engineer - Payments in London

Payments are at the heart of Apple's ecosystem — and we're reimagining how they work. The Payments Engineering team is building a modernised, cloud-native platform engineered for high throughput, elastic scalability, and the reliability that Apple's global transaction volume demands. If you love solving meaningful problems that impact millions of people, we want to hear from you.

The Payments Engineering team is part of the Wallet, Payments & Commerce (WPC) organisation. Our core mission is to build and maintain the foundational payment rails that enable all payment transactions across Apple's ecosystem — including the Apple Online Store, Apple Retail Stores globally, and the Apple App Store. We operate at global scale, handling Apple's immense transaction volume, and are at the forefront of fintech innovation, setting new payment trends and collaborating with leading fintech partners worldwide. Our team is growing and we are looking for engineers who are passionate about their craft, excited by the challenge of building systems at scale, and comfortable working in a dynamic, evolving environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of core payment processing services, owning components end-to-end from technical specification through to production.
• Drive architectural decisions and technical discussions, producing clear and well-reasoned design documentation that aligns engineering strategy across teams.
• Define and contribute to the technical roadmap for key platform components, balancing near‑term delivery with long‑term platform health.
• Mentor and support the growth of peers through code review, pairing, and thoughtful technical feedback.
• Partner closely with Product, Security, and Platform teams across multiple time zones to deliver cohesive, well-integrated solutions.
• Champion engineering excellence — continuously evaluating new technologies, patterns, and practices to raise the bar for the team.
• Participate in on‑call rotations and take ownership of the reliability, observability, and operability of the services you build.
• Drive incident response and post‑mortems, translating learnings into systemic, lasting improvements.

Minimum Qualifications

• Significant industry experience as a Software Engineer working on large-scale systems — we value depth of impact over years on paper.
• Hands‑on experience in designing and coding large-scale systems.
• A commitment to engineering excellence, continuous improvement, and the curiosity to evaluate and advocate for new technologies and patterns.
• An ability to communicate thoughtfully and clearly, both verbally and in writing, to drive consensus on complex technical concepts with diverse audiences, including global teams and external partners.
• The commitment and drive to see complex projects through from conception to production.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep hands‑on software development expertise with Java or Kotlin and Spring.
• Proven development and operational experience with high-volume REST and/or gRPC services.
• Strong experience designing for containerisation and orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Significant time spent architecting, building, and operating cloud-native (e.g., AWS) applications with resilience, failover, and self-healing as core features.
• Expertise in designing robust CI/CD pipelines and defining infrastructure as code.
• Extensive experience with observability strategies and tools (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Splunk).
• A fundamental appreciation for, and understanding of, security, privacy, and cryptography (e.g., PKI, certificate management, JWT).
• Hands‑on experience optimising databases for scale (e.g., Aurora, DynamoDB).
• Previous experience working in a DevOps environment.
• Familiarity with payments industry standards and compliance requirements (e.g., PCI‑DSS, ISO 8583, open banking protocols), or direct experience integrating with card networks, payment service providers, or acquiring banks.
• Experience using generative AI tooling (e.g., Claude Code) to accelerate delivery and maintain code quality.
• BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent experience. What matters most is your mindset, your initiative, and your demonstrated ability to apply advanced skills to real-world applications.

We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every preferred qualification. What matters most is your potential, mindset, and passion for the craft.

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.