Lead Site Reliability Engineer Software Engineer

Summary

People at Apple don't just build products, they craft the kind of experience that has revolutionized entire industries. The diverse collection of our people and their ideas inspire innovation in everything we do. Imagine what you could do here! Join Apple, and help us leave the world better than we found it. The Apple Service Engineering (ASE) team builds and provides systems and infrastructure that power Apple's services (such as iCloud, Apple Music, Apple Intelligence, and Maps). We are the foundation on which Apple's software developers build the products that our customers love. Our services have to scale globally, stay highly available, and "just work." If you love designing, engineering, and running systems and infrastructure that will help millions of customers, then this is the place for you!

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, an engineering-related field, or equivalent related experience 8+ years in a Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Infrastructure focused role Deep experience operating large-scale, multi-tenant Kubernetes environments in production Strong systems background — comfortable troubleshooting across the full stack (network, OS, container runtime, application) Expert-level Go, with a track record of shipping and owning controllers or operators that other teams depend on. Experience with configuration management at scale (Puppet, Ansible, or equivalent) Demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional initiatives to completion Strong written and verbal communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with third-party cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) Familiarity with bare-metal provisioning and lifecycle management at datacenter scale Understanding of cloud-native observability (Prometheus, Thanos, Splunk, or similar) Experience running infrastructure as an internal managed service with defined SLAs

Description

The ASE Compute team is looking for a senior SRE software engineer to own the technical direction of the Kubernetes internals that Apple's services run on. You will set the architecture for our controllers and namespace management infrastructure, strengthen the reliability of our Kubernetes services, and engage with the upstream community to drive Apple's requirements. You will write the hardest parts yourself, and raise what the rest of the team can build through design review, mentoring, and the tools you build. Service teams across Apple will come to you as the technical authority on what the platform can do and where it is going. The role also offers room to build AI-assisted tooling that accelerates triage, operational workflows, and infrastructure automation for the whole team.

Responsibilities

Own the architecture and technical direction for our controllers and namespace management infrastructure, from design through production operation at global scale. Find and fix the reliability problems that only appear past the point where upstream defaults and community guidance stop working, build each fix into the platform so the same class of problem does not come back, and automate the operational load that cannot be designed away. Set the reliability standards for the platform: SLOs, error budgets, alerting philosophy, upgrade and rollout strategy, and the runbooks that follow from them. Take on-call, lead incident response for the hardest production issues, and see the post-incident follow-up work through so the same incident does not happen twice. Represent Apple in the upstream Kubernetes community, driving our requirements through design proposals and code in the relevant SIGs. Grow the engineers around you through design review, code review, and direct mentoring. Lead cross-team technical efforts through ambiguity, and advise partner service teams and their leadership on platform capabilities and tradeoffs, shaping both their designs and the Compute roadmap.