Senior Data Services SRE - ASE Databases at Apple in Shanghai

Job description

• Posted:
• Sep 17, 2026
• 200683726
• Apple's Services Engineering organization (ASE) is seeking experienced distributed systems and database engineers to join our Databases SRE organization in Shanghai.
• The Databases SRE organization runs the data service technologies that Apple's internet services are built on, Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, Apache Solr, Redis/Valkey, and coordination systems such as etcd and Apache ZooKeeper. Each of these is owned by a dedicated SRE team, and this posting covers engineering roles across all of them. You will join one of these teams, matched to your background and to where the Shanghai site needs depth; you are not expected to arrive with experience in all of these technologies.
• 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.
• Day to day, you will own the reliability and performance of one of these platforms at Apple scale. The problems are shared across our teams even when the systems differ: replication and consistency, capacity and cost, safe rollouts across thousands of nodes, multi-datacenter failure domains, and the long tail of performance. Engineers regularly work across team boundaries on tooling and infrastructure common to all of our data services, so depth in one system and curiosity about the others matters more than experience with any specific technology.

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability, availability, and performance of one of Apple's data service platforms: Cassandra, Kafka, Solr, Redis/Valkey, or a coordination service such as etcd or ZooKeeper
• Design, build, and operate the control plane, automation, and tooling that deploy and manage these systems at scale
• Diagnose and resolve production problems across the full stack: application, JVM, operating system, storage, and network
• Participate in on-call rotation and incident response, and drive post-incident reviews into systemic fixes
• Build monitoring, alerting, and dashboards that make the health of the service legible to engineers and customers
• Lead capacity planning, performance analysis, and efficiency work as the service grows
• Execute safe, large-scale changes, rolling upgrades, expansions, and platform migrations, across thousands of nodes and multiple datacenters
• Contribute patches upstream to the open source projects we run, focused on stability, performance, and scaling
• Collaborate across the Databases SRE teams on shared tooling and infrastructure, and partner with Core Storage and Analytics teams
• Support internal platform customers with a high degree of customer focus, working effectively with colleagues in other locations and time zones

Requirements

• Demonstrated expertise developing distributed systems, database systems, storage engines, streaming or messaging systems, search platforms, coordination/consensus services, or performance engineering
• Depth in at least one data service technology, and the curiosity to learn others (the specific system matters less than the distributed systems fundamentals behind it)
• Understanding of core SRE concepts: monitoring, alerting, and incident management
• Understanding of distributed systems concepts (consistency models, replication and consensus protocols, isolation levels, crash and recovery semantics)
• Proficient in one or more of: modern Java, Go (golang), Python
• Operating systems concepts (process scheduling, disk and network I/O, performance)
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, and the ability to work effectively with a geographically distributed team
• Education: BS or MS in Computer Science / related fields or equivalent work experience
• Experience developing critical internet services and/or platform infrastructure
• Performance engineering (design concepts, profile-guided optimization)
• Service management and migrations across bare metal, virtualized (EC2), and containerized (Kubernetes) platforms
• Experience managing services run on Kubernetes
• Experience with EC2, EBS, and Terraform
• Fundamentals of system-level hardware and networking components (storage devices and controllers, network interfaces, CPU and memory layout in server-class systems)
• Datacenter architecture (networking topologies, host placement strategies, and failure modes); design of multi-datacenter systems; failure domains; and wide-area networking
• Experience contributing to open source distributed systems projects
• Prior experience with development or maintenance of distributed databases, streaming systems, or storage systems

Skills

Required

• Distributed systems development
• Database systems
• Storage engines
• Streaming or messaging systems
• Search platforms
• Coordination/consensus services
• Performance engineering
• Modern Java
• Go (golang)
• Python
• Operating systems concepts
• Strong written and verbal communication

Preferred

• Experience with EC2, EBS, and Terraform
• Datacenter architecture
• Multi-datacenter systems design
• Open source contributions