Software Engineer — Search & Indexing Platform, Apple Ads
Core
Design, build, and maintain large-scale distributed search and indexing systems that power real-time ad retrieval for Apple Ads.
Role type
Senior IC backend software engineer (search & indexing)
Builds
Streaming index pipelines, retrieval components (inverted indexes, ANN), and auto-scaling infrastructure for ad delivery
Domain
Advertising technology, distributed systems, search infrastructure
Deliverable
production ML models
Required skills
Rust, C++, Java, Scala, distributed systems, search fundamentals (inverted indexes, tokenization, sharding), streaming data infrastructure (Kafka, Kinesis), Kubernetes, high-throughput low-latency services
Preferred skills
embedding-based retrieval (EBR), approximate nearest neighbor (ANN), ad serving technology, latency-sensitive ML inference, A/B experimentation platforms, batch-to-streaming migration, developer tooling
Technologies
Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, Kubernetes, inverted indexes, ANN/EBR
Responsibilities
Design and build distributed search/indexing systems; develop streaming index pipelines; optimize retrieval components; implement ad eligibility/filtering logic; drive platform generalization; build auto-scaling infrastructure; develop observability tooling; contribute to offline experimentation infrastructure; participate in on-call rotations
Seniority
Senior, hands-on IC
