Software Engineer - Kafka

Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, new ideas become great products, services, and customer experiences quickly. Bring focus, rigor, and leadership to your team and shape the evolution of Apple's Kafka ecosystem. Apple is seeking an experienced software engineer, responsible for building, contributing to, and managing the core Apache Kafka infrastructure that powers Apple's critical services. This team develops, maintains, and scales Kafka internally while actively contributing to the upstream open-source project. Your work will impact all users of Apple products and services and ensure the reliability, performance, and evolution of Apple's messaging platforms.

Apple's Kafka organization develops messaging systems that are reliable, scalable, and performant. The role focuses on building and operating Apple-scale Kafka deployments while contributing directly to Kafka internals, including brokers, client libraries, replication, fault tolerance, partitioning, and system-level optimizations. You will design and implement core features, drive performance and reliability improvements, and take ownership of critical components across the Kafka ecosystem. The work spans both internal platform needs and upstream open-source contributions, with responsibility for high-quality code, rigorous engineering standards, and operational excellence in production environments.

• Experience in software development, with strong experience in distributed systems or messaging platforms at scale.
• Proven experience delivering complex, large-scale infrastructure or platform components.
• Proficiency in Java, Scala, or other languages used in Kafka development.
• Strong understanding of algorithms, data structures, fault tolerance, and performance for large-scale messaging systems.
• Hands on experience designing, building, and operating systems using Apache Kafka.

• Solid understanding of Kafka broker internals, including replication, partitioning, and client interaction.
• Familiarity with distributed systems concepts such as consensus, consistency models, and fault tolerance.
• Experience with multi datacenter deployments, load balancing, quota management, or tenant isolation.
• Experience with testing methodologies such as fault injection, performance benchmarking, or property based testing.
• Proven ability to maintain strong operational standards, including monitoring, incident response, and remediation.
• Experience contributing to or working with open source projects, ideally Apache Kafka or related ecosystems.
• Hands on experience with distributed system design and debugging at scale.
• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.