Apple
Systems Architect - Apple Pay
$216K–$325K
New York City, New York · Full-time · Posted Aug 14, 2026
About the job
Sets technical direction for Apple Pay’s distributed systems, improving reliability, scalability, observability, and operational practices for payment-critical infrastructure.
What you'll do
- Guide distributed-systems architecture and reliability practices, including SLOs, capacity planning, failure analysis, and observability.
- Review designs, write code and prototypes, and lead incident reviews and postmortems that drive systemic improvements.
- Collaborate across engineering teams and mentor engineers on distributed-systems fundamentals and trade-offs.
What they ask for
- Track record designing and operating distributed systems at scale in high-throughput, low-latency production environments.
- Deep expertise in distributed-systems fundamentals and scalable-system building blocks.
- Hands-on experience defining availability and scalability metrics, such as SLOs, error budgets, and distributed tracing.
- Demonstrated ability to set technical direction across teams and lead incident reviews or reliability programs.
Nice to have
- Experience with multi-region or globally distributed systems, including failover and disaster recovery.
- Experience in payments or other regulated, high-availability financial infrastructure; open-source contributions or technical writing; or establishing a devops/reliability practice.
Pay
$216,200 and $324,800 USD base salary
Tools
SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, distributed tracing, load balancing, caching layers, message queues/event streaming, database sharding/replication, service mesh, rate limiting/backpressure
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative