Senior Software Engineer - Platform Apps & Technologies
✨ AI Summary
Apple is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to build the backend for its internal AI agent marketplace and plugin registry. The role focuses on designing scalable distributed systems, supply-chain security, and API infrastructure for developer tools. Requires 5+ years of experience in large-scale system design, data-centric systems, and applied machine learning.
Our team builds the platform Apple's engineers use to work with AI agents: the coding agents themselves, the registry and marketplace that distributes the tools and extensions they run, and the sandboxing, identity, and supply-chain controls that make it safe to give an agent real access. We work closely with frontier labs and the teams that run Apple's model-serving infrastructure to bring the best models into engineers' hands quickly and safely. Our customers are Apple's own developers, MLEs, and data scientists — the people building the products Apple customers love.
We're a small team with unusually wide surface area. In a given month you might harden a CLI that ships to thousands of engineers, isolate an agent inside a VM, design the trust model for a plugin ecosystem, or make a new model available across every harness we support. We ship on short cycles and we live on everything we build. Our systems have to scale, stay highly available, and "just work." That's a tall order, and we're looking for talented and passionate engineers who love dealing with such challenges.
We're looking for a backend engineer to own and grow the service behind our marketplace and plugin ecosystem — the system that lets Apple's engineers discover, install, and trust the MCP servers, plugins, and skills that extend their agents. This is the registry, the API, and the database that every harness we ship reads from. You'll work across the full backend surface: schema design for a growing catalog of plugins/servers/endorsements, the content hosting and pipelines that ingest plugin source, auth, and the supply-chain checks that keep a plugin marketplace from becoming an attack vector. You'll also help harden the service itself for production: real uptime expectations, safe staging/prod rollouts, and the kind of database and caching decisions that hold up as the catalog and install volume grow.
You'll be successful here if you enjoy owning a service end to end and if you like working close to a genuinely new problem space (agent/plugin distribution) where the right abstractions aren't settled yet. You'll collaborate closely with the engineers building the client-side harnesses that consume this API, and with the security-minded reviewers who keep the catalog safe.
Minimum Qualifications
- 5+ years industry experience as a Software Engineer working on deploying large-scale systems
- Strong understanding in data centric systems, distributed systems, reliability, and cloud services
- Hands-on experience in designing and coding large scale systems
- Proven experience with applied machine learning, data engineering, or similar
- Bachelor in Computer Science or related experience
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with developer tools or developer productivity systems
- Experience with open source or inner source
- MS in Computer Science or related experience
About the Company
More jobs at Apple
-
Voice Platform Engineer
Hyderabad · · Sep 1, 2026
-
AIML - Staff ML Infrastructure Engineer, ML Platform & Technology - Pre-training Infrastructure
San Francisco Bay Area · · Aug 31, 2026
-
Senior ML Platform Engineer - Agentic Systems - Special Projects
Cupertino · · Aug 31, 2026
-
AI Quality & Test Automation Engineer
Cupertino · · Aug 31, 2026
-
Staff/Sr. Core Infrastructure Engineer, AI, Search & Knowledge Platforms
Seattle · · Aug 31, 2026