Sr. Content Support Engineer, ASE

We are Apple Services Engineering! ASE is the organization responsible for products like Apple Music, Podcasts, Apple TV, tvOS, App Store, iCloud, Business & Education, as well as technologies like Commerce, Search & Recommendations, and so much more. Our teams also build and manage cloud infrastructure, supporting teams and services across Apple. We're proud to do all our work on a massive scale, delivering services in multiple languages and global markets.

We're organized functionally, aligning people with similar expertise and focus on cohesive teams. We have verticals focused on a product, and horizontals that provide technology and platform solutions. Organizing this way allows us to take on new products, bring our technologies to other teams at Apple, and enable you to do your best work.

Digital Supply Chain Content Support Engineering is where content (books, music, podcasts, apps, videos), processing, CMS tools, and support processes meet. We're the heart and soul of the engineering team that builds the world's largest media store. Our stores reach hundreds of millions of customers worldwide and have revolutionized how people enjoy music, movies, TV shows, apps, books, and podcasts. You'll work on the Apple Music, Apple Books, and Apple Podcast ecosystems, helping to launch new features, fix bugs, keep our systems running smoothly, and spot any coding issues

Description

We are seeking a Content Support Engineer with a passion for music, books, and podcasts. An ideal candidate will demonstrate a commitment to enhancing customer experience and the quality of content and service that is synonymous with Apple. You will excel beyond industry norms by showcasing creativity in problem-solving, adaptability to new technical areas, and a dynamic thinking approach. We foster innovation and embrace new technology to enhance Apple's hardware performance and user experience.

Apple's exceptional integration of hardware, software, and services enables engineers to collaborate on a unified vision. This vision consistently emphasizes strengthening Apple's privacy policy, a core value of the company. Join us and contribute to the development of the next remarkable Apple product!

You will join an integral support and operations team within the Apple Services Engineering (ASE) organization, collaborating closely with our engineering teams to support various projects and features across the ASE ecosystem. Additionally, you will work cross-functionally with our internal business and operations teams in testing, monitoring, and providing support for these projects and features. Utilizing both technical and interpersonal skills will be crucial for your success in this role.

Responsibilities:

Serve as the primary point of contact for all technical groups and customers to address support issues and requests

Conduct technical analysis of incidents, perform root cause investigation and review with Engineering teams

Report, monitor, and troubleshoot the pipeline, and implement necessary workarounds

Debug and resolve complex issues across distributed and streaming data platforms, including latency spikes, consumer lag, and state/checkpoint failures

Monitor and troubleshoot Kafka topics, partitions, consumer groups, and offset management to maintain healthy data flow

Investigate and resolve Cassandra issues related to data persistence, replication, and consistency

Collaborate with Engineering teams and SREs to develop, implement, and improve Incident

Management and Problem Management processes

Work with Project Managers and Operations on new projects and developer communications

Analyze workflows, file detailed bug reports, and follow through until issues are resolved

Write and maintain scripts (Python/Java) to automate diagnostics, monitoring, and remediation tasks

Build and maintain observability tooling (dashboards, alerts, tracing) to proactively catch issues before they impact production

Preferred Qualifications

Experience implementing and administering observability tools: Splunk, Grafana/Mosaic, Sentry, and tracing systems

Familiarity with HDFS and batch-to-streaming data migration patterns

Knowledge of Oracle Golden Gate (OGG)

Experience with CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies across multiple environments

Minimum Qualifications

5+ years of experience in debugging technical issues, with at least 2+ years in distributed systems or streaming data platforms

Proficient in SQL and experience with modern streaming and big-data ecosystems (Apache Flink, Kafka, Cassandra, Spark)

Excellent scripting knowledge with Python or Java

Experience debugging streaming pipelines: latency analysis, lag monitoring, state management, and checkpoint/savepoint recovery in Flink

Proficiency with Kafka including topics, partitioning, consumer groups, and offset management

Cassandra expertise: data persistence patterns, replication strategies, and troubleshooting consistency issues

Proven ability to self-start, learn, plan, prioritize, and deliver to deadlines