Distinguished Engineer, Infrastructure Engineering, Wallet, Payments & Commerce

As a Distinguished Engineer for Infrastructure, you will define how Apple's financial services are stored, served, scaled, and routed. You will influence architecture before code is written, set the standards that govern data durability and request integrity, and shape how WPC consumes cloud and edge capacity worldwide.

Shape the long-term technical direction for WPC's data platforms, cloud architecture, and traffic and edge systems, spanning multi-region, high-availability, and active-active topologies.
Serve as a focal point for infrastructure strategy across WPC and broader Apple engineering, bringing clarity to ambiguous, cross-cutting problems.

Define the architectural principles that govern data integrity, consistency, durability, and recovery for systems that handle money and financial records.
Set the strategy for how WPC runs across cloud-native and hybrid environments, balancing scalability, resilience, cost, and security.

Define how traffic is routed, balanced, and protected from the edge through to backend services, including load balancing, failover, rate limiting, and capacity management at global scale.
Partner with Architecture, Platform, Security, Compliance, Product, and Business leaders to ensure infrastructure meets both Apple's user experience bar and the demands of a highly regulated, global ecosystem.
Mentor and elevate technical talent across teams, growing deep expertise in distributed systems, data engineering, cloud architecture, and traffic engineering.Data Services Architecture
Define the long-term architecture for WPC's transactional and analytical data platforms, including relational, distributed, and streaming data systems.
Set standards for data integrity, consistency models, durability, partitioning, and multi-region replication for financial systems where correctness is non-negotiable.
Architect data backup, recovery, and reconciliation strategies that protect financial records and customer trust.
Drive data lifecycle, retention, and governance approaches that satisfy regulatory and compliance requirements across global markets.
Define WPC's cloud-native and hybrid architecture, including compute, storage, networking, and platform services across AWS and comparable environments.
Establish patterns for elasticity, multi-region resilience, isolation, and disaster recovery for mission-critical payment workloads.
Balance scalability, cost-efficiency, security, and operability through measurable engineering standards rather than one-off decisions.
Lead large-scale platform and migration initiatives that modernize how WPC builds and runs on cloud infrastructure.
Define the architecture for global traffic management, including load balancing, routing, edge delivery, service mesh, and failover.
Establish strategies for capacity planning, traffic shaping, rate limiting, and graceful degradation under peak and adverse conditions.
Architect resilience patterns that keep payment flows available during regional failures, partner outages, and traffic surges.
Set latency, throughput, and availability targets across the request path from edge to backend.
Champion chaos engineering, failover validation, and disaster recovery across data, cloud, and traffic layers.
Define SLO and SLA standards, error budgets, and risk tolerance models for infrastructure that underpins financial services.
Establish systemic, design-time approaches to reliability rather than reactive operational fixes.
Set end-to-end observability standards across infrastructure, including metrics, tracing, and logging from edge through data tier.
Define the health indicators and engineering scorecards that make infrastructure quality measurable and visible.
Serve as the technical authority for infrastructure in senior engineering forums and influence strategic direction across WPC and Apple.
Drive alignment across data, cloud, traffic, security, and platform teams on shared systems and interfaces.
Identify opportunities to leverage Apple-wide systems and capabilities for WPC infrastructure needs.
Mentor and develop Principal and Senior Engineers in distributed systems, data, cloud, and traffic engineering.

10+ years of deep expertise across infrastructure engineering, including distributed data systems, cloud-native architecture, and traffic or networking systems at massive scale.
Proven experience designing and evolving large-scale distributed systems serving millions of users or high-volume transactions.
Strong foundation in cloud-native and hybrid architectures designed for scalability and resilience, with hands-on experience on AWS or comparable platforms.
Demonstrated expertise in data platforms, including consistency, durability, replication, and recovery for systems where correctness is critical.
Experience designing traffic management, load balancing, routing, or edge delivery for high-availability, multi-region systems.
Experience defining SLO and SLA frameworks and resilience strategies for mission-critical systems.
Track record of technical leadership, driving alignment and architectural direction across large, complex organizations.
Experience working with or building regulated or high-trust systems and understanding compliance implications.
Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts to executive and engineering audiences alike.
Demonstrated success mentoring and elevating technical talent across global teams.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

15+ years of experience across engineering including distributed data systems, cloud-native architecture, and traffic or networking systems at massive scale.Experience in payment systems, money movement, tokenization, or high volume transaction processing.
Experience operating active-active or multi-region failover architectures for financial or high-trust workloads.
Background in service mesh, API gateways, CDN, or edge infrastructure at global scale.
Experience with streaming data platforms, change data capture, or large-scale data reconciliation.
Familiarity with compliance-driven infrastructure design in financial ecosystems.
Experience evolving engineering culture toward measurable reliability, performance, and cost ownership.
Experience building or evolving shared infrastructure platforms that serve multiple products or business units.

We are seeking a Distinguished Engineer to define and lead the technical vision for WPC's core infrastructure across three deeply connected domains: data services, cloud engineering, and traffic engineering. This is a platform-defining technical authority role responsible for the systems that store financial data with integrity, run securely and elastically across cloud and hybrid environments, and route every request reliably at global scale. This is not an operations management role. It is a first-principles engineering leadership role reporting to the head of Infrastructure Engineering.

At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $257,400 and $386,300, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.

Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs. Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan. You’ll also receive benefits including: Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation. Learn more about Apple Benefits

Note: Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant

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Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.