Senior iOS Engineer - Creativity Apps

Senior iOS Engineer - Creativity Apps

Apple

Berlin, Germany

Description

As a Senior Software Engineer on our team, you will drive the architectural design, implementation, and evolution of core features for our next-generation creative applications. We’re looking for a problem-solver who excels in a dynamic environment, capable of both deep technical execution and strategic thinking across complex systems. You should be excited by the prospect of rapidly prototyping innovative concepts while simultaneously establishing robust, forward-looking architectural foundations.

This role is for you if you thrive in a dynamic environment and are equally comfortable with deep technical execution and strategic thinking. You have an instinct for the nuances of photography and the challenges faced by visual creators. You are not just writing code; you are shaping the future of how people capture, edit, and share their most cherished visual memories.

Responsibilities

• Product-Minded Feature Ownership: Owning features end to end; from a rough idea, through prototypes you put in front of real users, to a shipped experience you’re proud of. You’ll form your own opinions about what the product should do and defend them with taste, data, and working prototypes.
• Architectural Leadership: Defining and evolving the technical architecture for complex imaging workflows, ensuring scalability, performance, and future extensibility.
• Machine Learning Integration: Bringing ML capabilities into the product as first-class features; integrating on-device models into demanding pipelines, reasoning about accuracy, latency, and memory trade-offs, and designing interfaces that stay predictable and trustworthy when the underlying model isn’t.
• Performance & Efficiency Optimization: Meticulously optimizing performance, resource utilization, and responsiveness across demanding workflows, so the experience stays fluid and delightful even with large assets and intensive operations.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partnering closely with design, product management, domain experts, ML researchers, and other engineering teams — much of the interesting work on this team happens at the seams between groups, and you’ll be comfortable operating there.
• Working Effectively with AI Tools: Using modern AI developer tools fluently to move faster — exploring unfamiliar code, prototyping, generating tests, reviewing changes — with the judgment to know where they earn their keep and where they don’t. We expect the whole team to keep raising the bar on how we build, and we want your ideas on that.
• Technical Mentorship & Growth: Guiding and mentoring talented engineers, fostering strong development practices, and contributing to the growth and culture of the team.

Minimum Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional experience building and shipping production software.
• Demonstrated mastery of software architecture patterns, data structures, and algorithms, especially in high-performance contexts.
• Deep proficiency in at least one modern systems or application language (Swift, C++, Rust, Objective-C, Kotlin, Java, or similar), and a track record of picking up new platforms and languages quickly.
• Strong product sense: a history of shipping features where you owned the user experience, not just the implementation.
• Track record of effective cross-functional collaboration with design, product, and partner engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Apple’s core frameworks — UIKit, SwiftUI, Core Animation, AVFoundation, Core Image, and Metal (or equivalent graphics frameworks on other platforms).
• Experience integrating machine learning into shipping products — on-device inference, model performance and memory trade-offs, or building product experiences around probabilistic model output.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools and an interest in helping the team use them well.
• Extensive experience identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in client applications, with a focus on UI responsiveness, memory management, power efficiency, and real-time processing.
• Experience developing applications that involve complex media manipulation, rendering, or content creation workflows for professionals or enthusiasts (e.g., video editing, music production, graphic design, or advanced image processing).
• Demonstrated ability to technically lead projects, mentor engineers, and drive cross-functional initiatives from concept to delivery in a fast-paced environment.