Software Architect - Distributed Systems & Platform Engineering
Apple
Software Engineering, IT
Cupertino, CA, USA
USD 181,100-318,400 / year + Equity
Posted on Jun 4, 2026
Do you thrive at the intersection of big-picture thinking and hands-on technical execution? Are you energized by designing systems that are resilient, scalable, and elegant? As part of our CAD Infrastructure Development group, you'll help architect and build the distributed systems that power our products at scale. You'll ensure our services can seamlessly and efficiently handle large-scale demands. Joining this group means you'll be responsible for shaping the technical direction of our platform infrastructure. Together, you and your team will build the foundation that enables our engineering organization to deliver reliable, performant experiences to our customers. In this role, you will get to design new architectures and define patterns that enable other engineers to build better products, faster.
In this highly visible and cross-functional role as a member of our CAD Infrstructure Development team, you will be responsible for driving architectural decisions and best practices for distributed systems development. You will collaborate with multiple product and engineering teams to design, evaluate, and implement scalable microservices architectures, event-driven systems, and cloud-native platforms. Your work will enable us to increase system reliability, improve development velocity, and deliver high-quality services at scale.
- Experience architecting and driving development of complex distributed systems and platform software
- Experience in software architecture and systems design, including microservices decomposition and service contracts
- Experience in backend or systems-level languages, such as Go, Java, or Python
- Experience in using container orchestration platforms, such as Kubernetes
- Experience designing event-driven architectures and asynchronous communication patterns
- Experience of software quality methodologies, including design review, code review, and testing strategies
- Minimum requirement of BS + 10 years of relevant industry experience, with demonstrated ownership of architecture or systems design
- Experience architecting large-scale systems with Kubernetes-native patterns, including operators, CRDs, and service mesh
- Experience with message queues and streaming platforms, such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, or Pulsar
- Experience in DevOps and CI/CD methodologies, platforms, and tools, such as ArgoCD, Flux, or Jenkins
- Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, fault tolerance, and partitioning strategies
- Strong API design abilities across REST, gRPC, and event-driven interfaces
- Familiar with infrastructure-as-code tools, such as Terraform or Pulumi
- Familiar with GitOps workflows and progressive delivery practices
- Knowledgeable in observability and reliability engineering, including SLOs, distributed tracing, and circuit breakers
- Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and build consensus across teams on cross-cutting technical decisions