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.

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.

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 etc.).
• 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.

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.

Company Inclusion

Diversity includes. Inclusion empowers. And when we bring everybody in, we can do the best work of our lives together. That’s why we continue to strengthen our long-standing commitment to efforts such as inclusive hiring and development and equitable pay for all.

Everybody in. Everyone joins Apple for a reason. Often it’s because they found a company that aligns with their own values.

Starting here is just the beginning. People are at the heart of Apple and we want you to thrive. From day one, you’ll have the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to the big picture. You can set yourself up for success with our career development framework, as well as guidance and resources that include course offerings from Apple University.

Change is a constant throughout your career at Apple, and you may choose different ways to grow. You can seek even greater depth within your expertise, change scope in your current position or even explore a new opportunity here. Whatever you decide, you’ll play the lead role in your growth, and we’ll be behind you all the way.

Your work is as meaningful to us as it is to you. Apple is organised by functional specialities rather than business units — rare for a company our size. We’re experts leading experts: hardware experts lead hardware, software experts lead software and design experts lead design. This differs from most other large companies, where general managers oversee managers. Apple is Apple because those with the most expertise in an area of work have decision rights for that area.

Leaders at Apple combine their expertise with two other important characteristics: immersion in the details and a willingness to collaboratively debate during collective decision-making. For people at every level here, it can be liberating — even exhilarating — to work with experts who offer relevant guidance and mentoring. This approach to leadership is a commitment to collaboration that leads to innovation.

At Apple, collaboration is more than simply working together — it means passionate, collaborative debate. People on retail, hardware or marketing teams may focus on different issues, but the principles of respectful, honest discussion remain the same: we advocate ideas, contest points of view and ultimately build on each other’s thinking to come up with the best solution.

Cross-functional collaboration is crucial, because no one team is responsible for a product or a service on its own. Dozens of specialist teams may be needed for even a single key component of a new product. Yet each team works with a shared purpose — create an extraordinary user experience.

When experts make the decisions, they decide to innovate. Innovation is led by those who know their stuff, whether it’s the first job of their life or the latest project in a career decades in the making. At Apple, innovation depends not only on brilliant individuals, but also on a community of specialists, each focused on what we can do instead of what’s been done. We foster this culture by giving experts the room to take bold yet informed risks that lead to breakthroughs.

Everyone here is an innovator, or an innovator-to-be — even in areas customers don’t typically notice: consider the Siri curators and engineers who help reduce bias with continual updates and respectful neutrality in search responses. Or the teams who designed, produced and shipped millions of COVID-19 face shields for front-line medical workers. Or the chef in one of our cafés who patented our environmentally friendly pizza box.

There’s a place here for every kind of brilliant. Your speciality or ideal role may exist across many areas at Apple.