Software Engineer — Search & Indexing Platform, Apple Ads

About the role

We are looking for a Software Engineer to join the team responsible for Apple Ads' core search and indexing platform — the system that retrieves the most relevant ad candidates in response to real-time search queries across our ad placements. This platform operates at massive scale, handling tens of thousands of requests per second with strict latency requirements, and indexes millions of advertiser campaigns with complex targeting signals.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and maintain large-scale distributed search and indexing systems that power real-time ad retrieval
• Develop streaming index pipelines that reflect advertiser campaign changes in near-real-time, replacing legacy batch-only workflows
• Build and optimize retrieval components including inverted indexes, approximate nearest neighbor (ANN/EBR) indexes, query tree generation
• Implement ad eligibility and filtering logic at retrieval time — including keyword matching, audience targeting, budget enforcement, frequency capping
• Drive platform generalization — abstracting core retrieval capabilities (matching, eligibility, scoring

What you need

• Java
• C++
• Kafka
• Kubernetes
• Rust
• Scala

Good to have

• CI/CD
• Machine learning
• Incident response