Senior Software Engineer - Intelligence Platform Data Foundations, Proactive
Software Engineering
Cupertino, CA, USA
Posted on Jul 28, 2026
At Apple, creative ideas grow into extraordinary products, services, and user experiences. As AI continues to unlock entirely new device capabilities, building the next generation of intelligent system experiences starts with understanding the context of the user. The Intelligence Platform Data Foundations team builds the data modeling, persistence, and synchronization infrastructure that brings personalization to intelligent experiences across iPhone, Mac, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, and more. This is your opportunity to design the foundational systems powering features like Spotlight Search, Siri, and Apple Intelligence by integrating the user's personal context while fiercely protecting their privacy. If you love working at the intersection of high-performance systems and real customer impact, we'd love to meet you.
You will design, build, and optimize the data persistence and synchronization systems that bring personalized context to Apple Intelligence across every Apple device while keeping that data private and on device. You'll work across the Apple OS stack, from low-level storage and system frameworks up to the experiences customers touch every day, solving large-scale indexing and processing problems where performance, memory, and battery all matter. You'll partner closely with machine learning and feature teams to bring named entities and user-interaction signals into the platform, championing strong-typing best practices and Apple's exceptionally high bar for user privacy along the way. As a senior member of the team, you will take end-to-end ownership of critical components of the platform, from initial design through long-term maintenance and evolution. You will propose and drive new designs and architectures that shape the platform's technical direction, and provide design guidance and technical expertise to partner engineering teams across the company. You will also help modernize how we build — raising the bar for engineering and code-review practices and automating them with the latest agentic coding tools. To succeed, you'll be a strong systems and backend engineer and a creative problem solver who thrives in a fast-paced, collaborative environment, enjoys learning across domains, and takes pride in shipping reliable code that runs on the devices millions of people rely on.
- Design, build, and optimize on-device data persistence and synchronization systems spanning iOS, macOS, visionOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
- Solve large-scale indexing and data-processing problems with performant, resource-efficient solutions across the full stack.
- Partner with machine learning and feature teams to onboard named entities and user-behavior data streams into the platform.
- Champion strong-typing best practices and enforce Apple's high bar for user privacy across every layer of the data platform.
- Diagnose and resolve correctness, performance, and reliability issues with foundational system services in a distributed, multi-device environment.
- Provide design guidance and technical expertise to partner engineering teams across the company.
- B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
- Expertise in at least one compiled language (C/C++/Objective-C, Swift, Go, Java, Rust, etc.)
- Extensive experience with backend and systems-level programming
- Demonstrated experience building production data infrastructure such as databases, storage, serialization, or synchronization systems.
- Strong skills in concurrency and multi-threaded software design.
- Ability to write reliable, resilient, performant, and well-tested code.
- Strong problem-solving, debugging, and technical communication skills.
- Experience delivering production software within large engineering projects.
- Experience building database or search integrations.
- Experience with distributed systems and data synchronization across devices or nodes.
- Familiarity with machine learning concepts and experience collaborating with ML teams.
- Experience with performance profiling and tracing tools.
- Experience with macOS or iOS development.
- Familiarity with data serialization formats and schema/strong-typing design.
- Passion for building privacy-preserving, high-performance foundational technologies underlying intelligent system experiences.