Senior Backend Engineer (Find My)

Your devices are lost. They have no network connection. Find My locates them anyway, using a crowd-sourced network spanning nearly a billion Apple devices worldwide.

Making that work at this scale, reliably and without compromising anyone’s privacy, is the engineering problem. You’ll be working on the services underneath it.

We operate as an independent team inside Apple: small, autonomous, and accountable end to end. You’ll own services from design through production.

Our roadmap changes. A capability lands, a threat model shifts, a partner team reprioritizes, and the plan from six weeks ago is now the wrong plan. We rewrite it. If you need a stable twelve-month backlog to do your best work, this will frustrate you. If ambiguity reads as opportunity rather than risk, you’ll like it here.

Priorities and the problems worth solving are given. How they get solved is largely yours to figure out. We’re looking for people who take a goal and run with it, and who push back when the goal looks wrong.

We build frameworks used by ourselves, other teams, and the developer community. The work spans several teams at once, so managing dependencies without letting quality slip is part of the job rather than an afterthought.

The work is on-site in Malmö, Sweden. You’ll need to be here, or willing to move here. Working language is English, written and spoken.

Minimum Qualifications

• Enough production experience that you’ve been wrong at scale and learned from it. We care about depth, not the number of years. You’ve debugged something in production that only reproduced under real load or real concurrency.
• Deep Java, not just working Java. The memory model, GC behavior and tuning, allocation pressure, java.util.concurrent beyond synchronized, virtual threads versus classic reactive models. We’ll ask you to explain a decision you made at this level.
• Proven experience building and scaling customer-facing web services: authentication, authorization, availability, spam control, reliability, and performance tuning under load.
• You reason about distributed systems (consistency, partitioning, and failure modes) as a matter of course, not as a later concern.
• Strong knowledge of data storage and caching technologies like Postgres, Cassandra, Redis, and memcached or similar. Experience writing REST based services using Netty or similar frameworks

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of cryptography standards and protocols (PKCS, KMIP, X.509, AES, KDF, CA) is a significant plus. This is a system where key handling and privacy guarantees are load-bearing.
• Familiarity with ML systems, frameworks, and algorithms is a bonus.
• Familiarity with GitHub, and build and deployment tools like Maven, Docker, Spinnaker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience in cross team collaboration and communication across multiple timezones
• Able to work in an ambiguous and highly interdependent work environment to get things done in an efficient and tactful way
• Ability to thrive in a multi-functional team on high-profile, critical projects
• Knowledge and experience with CI/CD tooling and full automation testing.
• You read the source of your dependencies when the docs run out.
• Strong communication, written and verbal. You can explain a technical decision to engineers and non-engineers alike, write a design document others can follow, and hold your position in a discussion without needing to win it. Much of this team’s work is decided in writing and in the room, not in the code.