Evaluation Reliability SRE

Siri's quality signal drives every model and product decision before a release ships. But a signal is only as trustworthy as the infrastructure behind it.

The Evaluation Reliability Engineering (ERE) team exists to make that infrastructure bulletproof. Within ERE, Core SRE owns the production backbone: resource management, session orchestration, on-call response, and the observability systems that surface failures before they corrupt evaluation signal. We sit at the intersection of distributed systems, ML evaluation infrastructure, and operational excellence.

Description

This is a senior hands-on role. You share primary on-call as part of a global follow-the-sun rotation, lead incident investigations end-to-end, and set the operational bar the rest of the team works against. You are fluent with agentic coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot, and use them as a force multiplier across runbook authoring, automation, and log analysis.

Responsibilities:

Own reliability outcomes across the evaluation infrastructure stack: orchestration, capacity, and service health

Own runbook quality across the team: author runbooks for complex failure categories and set the bar that guides other engineers to produce the same quality

Build deep expertise in the device orchestration and provisioning layers - understand quota management, retry behavior, and failure modes well enough to diagnose upstream issues independently

Instrument infrastructure components that lack observability; if a failure is hard to detect, make it easy to detect before the next occurrence

Balance incident response with proactive reliability work - automation and eliminating recurring failures are core deliverables

Partner on SLO definition and burn-rate alerting; bring the operational depth that turns reliability targets from aspirational to measurable

Influence the team's technical roadmap, mentor junior SREs, and represent infrastructure reliability posture to leadership and in cross-team reviews

Preferred Qualifications

Experience owning or closely operating a device or VM provisioning pipeline; familiarity with virtualization-layer failure modes is a strong plus

Track record of improving system reliability against measurable outcomes - uptime, MTTR, incident frequency - not just responding to incidents but eliminating their causes

Incident command discipline: able to lead a multi-team incident from declaration to close-out

Depth in at least one of: distributed systems reliability, device management infrastructure, evaluation or ML platform operations

Demonstrated cross-team technical influence; prior experience shaping reliability practices beyond the immediate team

Minimum Qualifications

5+ years of site reliability, infrastructure, or platform engineering experience with direct on-call ownership in production systems

Hands-on orchestration experience (Kubernetes or equivalent): cluster health, resource management, scheduling, and failure diagnosis at scale

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 $212,000 and $318,400, 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