9 jobs for "Senior System Engineer - OS Kernel"

SPEAR is a team of engineers in Apple's Security Engineering & Architecture (SEAR) organization focused on strengthening security across all of Apple's operating systems. We work in a lot of different codebases, at every layer of the stack, on features that ship to over a billion people without getting in their way.

We're looking for a senior engineer to build the automation and intelligence tooling that lets us ship that work with confidence. You'll design the harnesses, infrastructure, and AI-assisted workflows that make correctness verifiable across iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS. Help us accelerate our security hardening work with the AI tooling to match its scale.

Description

You'll join a multi-functional team covering every layer of the operating system - from apps to the kernel - working directly with feature engineers in SEAR and across the wider OS organization.

Day to day, you'll decide where automation is worth building, then build it. You own the question of how this team proves that security-critical code does what it claims, without degrading the experience for our customers. You will also help us define AI-native security-based development by assessing where agents accelerate our work and where manual testing and human oversight remain necessary to safeguard the customer experience.

Preferred Qualifications

You've built agentic or LLM-backed developer tooling, such as evals, harnesses, MCP servers, or code-generation pipelines, and you have opinions about where it holds up and where it falls over.

Familiarity with XCTest, Xcode, and working in large shared codebases.

Background in security, systems-level, or platform software.

Experience setting test strategy: assessing risk, deciding what's worth covering, triaging and prioritizing.

Curiosity about how systems work end to end, and the patience to find out.

Minimum Qualifications

Strong programming skills in Swift, Objective-C, or Python, with a track record of building tools, frameworks, or infrastructure that other engineers depend on.

Experience designing and deploying automated verification at scale, including harnesses and CI systems

Real fluency with AI-assisted development. You use LLMs, coding agents, or tooling you've built yourself to get substantially more done, and you can explain how.

You've owned an ambiguous technical problem that crossed team boundaries and driven it to something that actually landed.

You can explain a technical trade-off clearly enough to change a partner team's mind.

Pay & Benefits

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 $216,200 and $324,800, 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.

About Apple

Working at Apple means doing more than you ever thought possible and having more impact than you ever imagined.

Size: 10,000+ employees
Industry: Technology

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