Software Engineer — Triage Intelligence and Debug Engineering

The Triage Intelligence and Debug Engineering team operates at the deepest layers of Apple's software stack, with a mandate that spans the entire product ecosystem. The work we do directly shapes the reliability of over 2 billion active Apple devices — every crash triaged, every panic root-caused, and every automated pipeline we build contributes to the OS stability that hundreds of millions of people depend on every day. We partner closely with engineering teams across Apple to drive that reliability end-to-end, influencing how the entire organization detects, understands, and resolves systemic failures.

We are looking for a curious and motivated Software Engineer with a passion for OS internals, automation, and intelligent systems. The impact of this role is broad and direct — your investigations will uncover failures affecting Apple's entire device ecosystem, your contributions will touch software running across iPhone, Mac, and Apple Silicon, and the automation pipelines you help build will shape how reliability engineering scales across Apple. You will dig into the operating system to understand the true origin of crashes and panics — not just the symptom at the top of a stack trace, but the underlying system-level conditions that caused it. You will operationalize that understanding by encoding triage logic into automation pipelines, and explore how ML and AI techniques can make those pipelines smarter over time. You will collaborate across Software, Hardware, and Silicon Engineering teams to drive issues all the way to resolution. This role is a strong fit for an engineer who is eager to learn how operating systems work at a deep level, excited to build scalable automation and intelligent tooling, and motivated by seeing their work have real, measurable impact.

Responsibilities:

• Triage crashes and panics across Apple's OS stack by analyzing crash logs, kernel panics, and core dumps to isolate root cause.
• Collaborate with Software, Hardware, and Silicon teams to propose fixes, close coverage gaps, and drive issues to resolution.
• Encode triage logic into automation pipelines so future instances are classified and escalated without manual intervention.
• Apply ML and AI techniques — crash clustering, anomaly detection, pattern recognition — to build smarter triage pipelines.
• Build debug tooling, scripts, and CI/CD integrations that surface OS-level signals and validate platform stability at scale.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Foundational understanding of OS internals: process and thread lifecycle, virtual memory, scheduling, synchronization, and system calls.
• Ability to read and reason through crash reports and kernel panics — backtraces, register state, and basic memory analysis.
• Hands-on experience with debugging tools such as LLDB, GDB, or Instruments.
• Proficiency in Python for scripting, automation, and test infrastructure.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Working knowledge of C and/or Swift for debug tooling or system-level development.
• Exposure to automation frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, or scalable test systems.
• Experience applying ML or AI techniques to systems problems — crash clustering, log anomaly detection, failure classification, or intelligent alert prioritization.
• Familiarity with LLMs or generative AI tooling in an engineering context — prompt engineering, RAG pipelines, or AI-assisted debugging workflows.
• Prior coursework or project experience in OS internals, systems programming, or low-level debugging.
• Familiarity with Apple platform internals: XNU kernel, Darwin subsystems, IOKit, libdispatch, or dyld.
• Contributions to automation frameworks or developer tooling that improved engineering productivity.
• Experience or interest in collaborating across silicon, firmware, or platform systems teams.
• Enthusiasm for building tools and systems that empower other engineers.

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. Learn about accessibility in Apple’s workplace.