Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Storage SRE / Apple Services Engineering

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.

Responsibilities:

Serve as the SRE Technical Lead across ADP, partnering with vertical SRE teams and software engineering organizations to ensure reliability standards are consistently applied across the full data platform

Define and drive adoption of SLO frameworks, error budget policies, and incident management practices across ADP services

Provide architectural review and reliability guidance for new services and major platform changes, identifying risks and influencing design before they reach production

Lead the development of shared observability, automation, and infrastructure-as-code tooling that benefits multiple ADP teams simultaneously

Identify and eliminate systemic sources of toil and instability across the platform; advocate for and deliver platform-wide reliability improvements

Mentor and grow SRE engineers across teams, establishing a culture of engineering excellence and continuous improvement

Represent ADP SRE in cross-organizational forums, communicating technical strategy and reliability posture to ASE and Apple leadership

Programming in Python and Golang, supported by Generative AI tooling, to accelerate development of mission-critical shared automation and tools

Production on-call and incident management responsibilities, including leading response for high-severity cross-platform incidents

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

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