Forward Deployed Software Engineer - Platforms Engineering, Enterprise Technology Services

Responsibilities

Embed with engineering teams to understand their applications and workflows, then design, build, integrate, and deploy software that addresses their needs and can become reusable platform capabilities. Operate the services the team owns, participate in on-call support, and improve the reliability and usability of Apple's engineering platform.

Requirements

Requires at least two years of professional software engineering experience, strong backend development skills, and practical knowledge of APIs, distributed systems, databases, networking, cloud platforms, Linux, security, and production operations. Candidates should demonstrate technical leadership, sound judgment with ambiguous requirements, and strong communication; experience with React, Kubernetes, infrastructure automation, observability, and AI integrations is preferred.

Skills

• Go
• Software Architecture
• REST And gRPC APIs
• Distributed Systems
• Relational Databases
• Networking
• Cloud Computing
• Linux
• Kubernetes
• CI/CD
• Production Operations
• Observability
• React And TypeScript
• Infrastructure Automation
• LLM Integration
• Technical Leadership

About this role

Do you want to help build some of the largest and most consequential enterprise
and customer technology systems in the world? Join Apple’s Information Systems
and Technology (IS&T) organization. IS&T is the engine behind everything Apple
does for customers and for the people who build for them. It’s Apple’s central
nervous system. Supporting 2.5 billion active Apple devices, processing billions
of secure transactions, and keeping the technology that defines modern life
running flawlessly, IS&T makes the impossible feel effortless.Do you love
building solutions to handle global complexity and immense scale? Imagine what
you could do here. At Apple, new ideas have a way of becoming extraordinary
products, services, and customer experiences. Bring passion and dedication to
your job and there's no telling what you could accomplish. That same passion for
innovation that goes into our products also applies to our practices,
strengthening our dedication to leave the world better than we found it! Most
software engineering roles hand off testing to one team and operations to
another. Here you own all of it. As a Software Engineer on Forge, you'll design,
build, test, ship, and run the platform Apple's engineering teams build on,
working closely with those teams to find where the infrastructure beneath them
gets in the way and fixing it. Forge is part of Enterprise Technology Services
(ETS), within Apple's Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization,
the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who
build for them. Forge is building the platform Apple's engineering organizations
can use to take a service from code to running in production. That path has
traditionally run through a series of separate specialist systems. We are
bringing it together on a common platform with a shared core, so a team goes
from allocated capacity to a live production service without assembling the
pieces themselves. Our job is to get teams to production quickly, on a platform
that stays secure and reliable without them having to think about it. Our
charter is deliberately wide and still growing, reaching from the physical fleet
in the data center to the surfaces engineering teams build against, and
extending into new environments and new classes of infrastructure as Apple's
needs evolve. We are a small team with outsized reach, bringing an AI-first
mindset to how the platform operates and improves itself, and the best work we
do takes one team's hardest problem and turns it into a capability every team
inherits.

DESCRIPTION

As a Forward Deployed Software Engineer, you will embed with the engineering
teams who use our platforms, then build the software that solves their problems.
This is a software engineering-first role that goes well beyond feature
development: you will sit with a customer team to understand their applications
and workflows, translate ambiguous requirements into a technical design, write
the production code, integrate it with existing systems, and stay with it
through deployment and operational readiness. We run what we build, so you will
also share an on-call rotation for the services the team owns — which is the
fastest way to learn where the platform still falls short. The work spans Go
backend services, React and TypeScript applications, REST and gRPC APIs,
distributed systems, and automation that reaches into public cloud, private
cloud, Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal environments. You will also
build AI-assisted capabilities — LLM integrations, and agentic workflows — along
with the evaluations and quality controls that make those capabilities
measurable and trustworthy enough to run in production. You will move
comfortably from a technical discussion with an engineering customer to
designing a solution, writing the code, and validating that it works reliably at
scale. You will approach loosely defined problems with curiosity and sound
judgement, and you will know when a recurring customer request should become a
reusable platform capability rather than another one-off integration. You care
about clean, maintainable code, thoughtful architecture, and operational
reliability, and you are as motivated by simplifying an existing system as by
building a new one. In a team with daring goals and real autonomy, you will take
utmost ownership of what you ship — and measure your success by the engineering
problems you solve and the lasting improvements you leave behind in the
platforms other teams build on.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

2+ years of professional software engineering experience designing and
delivering production software Strong backend development skills in Go, or in a
comparable language such as Rust, C++, or Python with the ability to become
productive in Go Solid understanding of software architecture, REST and gRPC
APIs, distributed applications, and relational data modelling Hands-on
experience with relational and distributed SQL databases such as PostgreSQL,
Oracle, Aurora, or CockroachDB, including schema design, migrations, query
performance, and connection management Strong networking fundamentals including
TCP/IP, subnetting, routing, TLS, and DNS record types, together with practical
load balancing experience across L4 and L7, health checks, session affinity, and
DNS-based global traffic management such as Route 53 or an equivalent Experience
with a major cloud provider such as AWS, GCP or AliCloud, across compute,
storage, networking, load balancing, and identity and access management Working
knowledge of Linux, including systemd, processes, filesystems, permissions, and
command-line troubleshooting Understanding of service-to-service authentication
and transport security, including mTLS, PKI and certificate lifecycle, OIDC, and
RBAC Familiarity with software delivery practices including source control,
automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and production deployments Experience
operating services in production, including obse...

About Apple

Computers and Electronics Manufacturing · 10,001+ employees · headquartered in Cupertino, California · founded 1976