Data Services SRE Manager - ASE Databases at Apple in Shanghai

Job description

• Posted:
• Sep 17, 2026
• 200683730
• Apple's Services Engineering organization (ASE) is seeking an experienced data systems engineering manager to join our Databases SRE organization. The organization is expanding its footprint into Shanghai and is seeking an experienced engineering manager to build out and lead this site.
• The Databases SRE organization is responsible for the full portfolio of database and data service technologies that Apple's internet services are built on, Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, Apache Solr, Redis/Valkey, etcd and other coordination services, and the platforms that run them. This is a cross-service role from day one: you will build and lead a team accountable for the reliability, scalability, and performance of all of these technologies as operated from the Shanghai site, and act as the site lead for the Databases SRE organization there.
• ASE Databases SRE teams develop applications and tooling that are safe, reliable, scalable, and fast. This work requires an innovative spirit and an extraordinary degree of care and rigor in engineering. Team members contribute to all major components of our data service deployment infrastructure, including maintenance automation, backup services, monitoring and alerting tooling and dashboards, deployment architecture, and upstream contributions to the open source projects we run, focused on stability, performance, and scaling.
• The team's work is deployed at massive scale, serving millions of queries per second over hundreds of petabytes of data across our data centers worldwide. It also has big impact, forming the platform upon which iCloud and many other internet services at Apple are built. In ASE, your work will benefit hundreds of millions of users and is critical to the success of some of the most visible current and future Apple features.
• This is a hands-on leadership role. We are seeking a manager with real domain experience who is comfortable working in the details, setting technical direction across several data service technologies rather than a single one, while building a new site from the ground up.

Responsibilities

• Hire, lead, develop, and grow a team of Site Reliability Engineers supporting Apple's data service platforms: Cassandra, Kafka, Solr, Redis/Valkey, and coordination services such as etcd and zookeeper
• Own the reliability, availability, and performance of these mission-critical data platforms as operated from the Shanghai site
• Act as site lead for the Databases SRE organization in Shanghai, growing the site's scope and capability over time
• Set technical direction for automation and scaling initiatives that apply across the portfolio rather than to a single technology
• Drive incident response, post-incident reviews, and the systemic improvements that reduce operational toil
• Establish and refine SRE practices including SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, and change management
• Manage on-call rotations and ensure sustainable, well-supported operational coverage
• Partner with software engineering, Core Storage, and Analytics teams to influence system design for reliability, scalability, and operability
• Engage internal platform customers with a high degree of customer focus, building credibility with engineers and partners across Apple
• Communicate clearly across a geographically distributed organization to build a culture of visibility, transparency, and shared ownership

Requirements

• Engineering management experience leading infrastructure, SRE, or data platform teams
• Experience developing or leading work in distributed systems, database systems, storage engines, validation engineering, or performance engineering
• Breadth across more than one data service technology, and the appetite to go deep on several (no single technology defines this role)
• Experience developing critical internet services and/or platform infrastructure
• Understanding of core SRE concepts: monitoring, alerting, and incident management
• Advanced understanding of data structures and algorithms in storage and indexing
• Familiarity with modern Java, and optionally Python or Go
• Expertise in project management, project planning, and making the unpredictable predictable
• Ability to rapidly build credibility with engineers, customers, and partners, and to quickly learn new technical domains
• Comfort working with geographically distributed partners across regions and time zones
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Education: BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science / related fields or equivalent work experience
• Experience operating more than one class of data service (for example a distributed database, a streaming or messaging system, a search platform, an in-memory store, or a consensus/coordination service)
• Experience leading control plane services for managing data plane infrastructure
• Understanding of distributed systems and database concepts (consistency models, isolation levels, replication and consensus protocols, crash and recovery semantics)
• Performance engineering (design concepts, profile-guided optimization)
• Service management and migrations across virtualized (EC2) and containerized (Kubernetes) platforms
• Fundamentals of system-level hardware and networking components (storage devices and controllers, network interfaces, CPU and memory layout in server-class systems)
• Operating systems concepts (process scheduling, disk and network I/O, performance)
• Datacenter architecture (networking topologies, host placement strategies, and failure modes); design of multi-datacenter systems; failure domains; and wide-area networking
• Experience building out a new engineering site or establishing a team in a new location
• Prior experience with development or maintenance of distributed databases, streaming systems, or storage systems

Skills

Required

• Engineering management
• Distributed systems
• Database systems
• Storage engines
• Validation engineering
• Performance engineering
• Data structures and algorithms
• Java
• Project management
• Communication
• Leadership

Preferred

• Python
• Go
• Kubernetes
• EC2
• System-level hardware
• Networking
• Operating systems
• Datacenter architecture