Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Apple Data Platform Compute SRE

At Apple, we believe that innovation flourishes in an environment where ideas

are challenged, collaboration is encouraged, and technology is pushed to its

limits. This environment is only possible when diverse minds come together,

bringing unique perspectives and experiences. Our people and their ideas inspire

innovation in everything we do. Imagine what you could accomplish here! Join

Apple and help us make the world a better place. As a principal contributor and

technical lead in our Apple Data Platform (ADP) SRE organization, you will apply

SRE principles as you mentor and partner with our engineers and partner teams,

ensuring large-scale analytics infrastructure runs reliably and efficiently.

This role focuses on driving reliability standards, architectural consistency,

and engineering excellence across peer SRE teams and partner engineering

organizations — spanning Hadoop, HBase, Spark, Data Lakes, and Airflow

ecosystems — through technical leadership, cross-functional alignment, and the

development of platform-wide tooling, observability, and operational practices

that raise the reliability bar for all of ADP. This role includes production

on-call responsibilities.

DESCRIPTION

Apple Service Engineering (ASE) teams build and scale the platforms and

infrastructure behind many of Apple’s services — including iCloud, iTunes, Siri,

and Maps. We are the foundation on which Apple’s software developers build the

products that our customers love. We are looking for a passionate and dedicated

Technical Lead to drive SRE standards and engineering excellence across the

entire Apple Data Platform organization. The Apple Data Platform (ADP) SRE

Technical Lead partners with multiple SRE and engineering teams across the data

platform — including teams responsible for Hadoop and HBase infrastructure,

Spark, S3-compatible storage, and Airflow-orchestrated pipelines. Rather than

owning a single vertical, this role sets the technical direction for how

reliability is practiced across ADP: defining SLOs, establishing architectural

review processes, developing shared tooling and automation, and ensuring that

SRE principles are applied consistently as the platform scales. You will be a

force multiplier — making every team around you more effective.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent 12+ years of experience in Site

Reliability Engineering, managing infrastructure and services at scale 5+ years

of experience in technical leadership roles, with demonstrated ability to lead

horizontally across teams without direct authority Broad expertise across the

data platform stack: Hadoop (HDFS, YARN), HBase, Apache Spark, Data Lake

architectures, S3-compatible storage solutions, and Apache Airflow History of

defining and driving SLO/error budget frameworks and reliability practices

across multiple teams or services Demonstrable programming skills to develop

shared tooling, lead code reviews, and set engineering standards Strong written

and verbal communication skills — able to present technical strategy to both

engineers and leadership Advanced knowledge of Linux, networking, and

distributed systems fundamentals

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

15+ years of experience in SRE or related work managing infrastructure at scale

Experience with Ceph object storage operations Kubernetes cluster operations

experience, particularly running stateful data workloads Experience with scale

testing, disaster recovery, and capacity planning across distributed data

systems Experience driving multi-year platform migrations or large-scale

architectural transitions Ability to define the technical roadmap for a data

platform organization and drive cross-functional alignment on architectural

standards and best practices Background in data security, access control, or

compliance-sensitive data environments