Senior Software Engineer - UI Rendering

Apple's Compositing, Color, and Display Software organization provides the graphics software foundation for all of Apple's innovative products, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac, and Apple Watch. Our goal is to enable developers and HI designers to create exceptional visual experiences by efficiently utilizing hardware acceleration and color technologies through compositing and display. The technologies we develop are central to enabling enhanced experiences across our platforms, including acceleration for Liquid Glass UI material and presenting content with the highest color fidelity.

Are you excited to bring new UI experiences to millions of people around the world across our products? Are you passionate about solving complex graphics challenges in innovative ways, to deliver beautiful, responsive experiences at scale? Do you enjoy working collaboratively on a common goal to bring the best experience to our customers? If all this resonates with you, this is the job for you.

We are looking for an exceptional Lead Engineer with deep graphics rendering expertise and a proven track record of driving complex engineering projects across organizational boundaries. In this role, you will serve as the technical lead for major graphics and rendering initiatives, shaping the CoreAnimation rendering pipeline, Metal command generation, and low-level compositing architectures powering visual experiences across Apple's product ecosystem—from Apple Watch, Home, and Apple TV devices to iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision platforms.

At the intersection of design, frameworks, and low-level platform systems, you will act as a force multiplier across engineering teams. You will architect complex, performance-critical software and lead multi-team collaborations with UI Frameworks, System Experience, Human Interface (HI) Design, and GPU/Hardware teams to bring new UI materials (such as blur and glass effects), system animations, and platform experiences to life. Simultaneously, you will champion systemic optimizations that reduce rendering latency across CPU and GPU pipelines, maximize battery efficiency, and eliminate visual corruptions across diverse hardware configurations.

Minimum Qualifications

• • 5+ years of experience in software development, including software release management and integration processes
• • 3+ years of experience with real-time rendering and computer graphics
• • Demonstrated track record of leading complex, multi-team engineering projects from concept to shipping.
• • Strong expertise in C/C++ programming, and GPU-accelerated rendering pipelines.
• • Hands-on experience with modern graphics APIs (Metal, Vulkan, or DirectX) and low-level rendering optimization.
• • Foundational understanding of Operating Systems, Computer Architecture, and CPU/GPU programming including memory subsystems
• • Strong debugging and triaging skills for complex, multi-layered systems issues
• • Excellent collaboration skills with cross-functional teams on complex large-scale projects
• • Proven ability to architect complex, performance-critical software systems and align cross-functional technical strategy.
• • Demonstrated expertise in graphics performance analysis, profiling, and optimization across CPU/GPU boundaries.
• • Practical experience incorporating modern AI-assisted workflows and agentic coding tools into software engineering practices.
• • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• • Deep expertise with tile-based rendering GPUs architecture and advanced graphics programming
• • Experience with low-level Metal/Vulkan/D3D12 command generation, multi-threaded rendering architectures, or CPU/GPU synchronization models.
• • Experience with client/server or multi-process graphics architectures
• • Experience shipping consumer graphics products at scale
• • Experience with automated testing frameworks for graphics rendering
• • Technical leadership experience corresponding to ICT5 scope on large-scale platform software projects.
• • Deep knowledge of CoreAnimation, layer-based compositing systems, scene graph architectures, or multi-process graphics engines.
• • Experience delivering graphics and UI rendering capabilities across diverse hardware constraints (mobile, wearable, spatial computing, home/embedded, desktop).
• • Knowledge of color management, HDR presentation, wide color gamut workflows, or advanced shader programming (MSL/GLSL/HLSL).
• • Familiarity with iOS, macOS, watchOS, or visionOS software development in Swift or Objective-C.