At Apple, new ideas have a way of becoming phenomenal products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. Imagine what you could do here. Bring passion and dedication to your job and theres no telling what you could accomplish.
We are a team of software engineers developing web-based tools and native applications for Apple teams. Our work empowers Apple engineers and researchers to build the products that inspire and delight millions every day.
Were looking for a Site Reliability Engineer who thinks like a systems engineer first and an operator second. You wont just keep things running - youll shape how our platform evolves. Our team operates 50+ services across Kubernetes and AWS, handles sensitive health and research data, and is ramping up many architectural shifts: new service-to-service auth patterns, event-driven pipelines, and a move from on-prem to cloud-native infrastructure. We need someone who gets excited about that kind of work, can reason about distributed systems at the design level, and is a strong enough communicator to bring the rest of the team along.
The Human Engineering Software team builds tools used across Apple for user studies, research participant management, health data collection, and privacy-preserving analytics. Our infrastructure spans Django backends, Kubernetes clusters (self-hosted and AWS), PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Elasticsearch and a growing set of internal service integrations.
This role is engineering-forward SRE. Youll spend as much time designing systems as operating them. Youll work closely with our full-stack engineers to improve how services communicate, how we observe production behavior, and how we ship changes safely. Youll have a seat at the architecture table - we want you proposing solutions, not just implementing them. Platform & Reliability Engineering - Own the reliability of our Kubernetes-hosted services across AWS and self-hosted clusters: deployments, scaling, capacity planning, certificate management, and secrets rotation. Design and implement SLO-driven observability: define meaningful SLIs, build dashboards that answer "is the system healthy?" not just "is the pod running?" Drive incident response and blameless postmortems
Distributed Systems & Architecture - Partner with the architecture team on system design: service-to-service authentication (OIDC, gateway auth), event-driven messaging (Kafka), API gateway patterns. Design the infrastructure layer to make architecture proposals real in production. Evaluate and recommend new tools, patterns, and platforms and write code when its the right tool, whether thats a deployment operator, a health check service, or a data pipeline component. This isnt a YAML-only role
Engineering Enablement - Make the team efficient; own CI/CD pipelines and GitOps practices, owning tests to verify or production tools are functioning correctly, build self-service automation, evolve our observability and security posture, and communicate infrastructure decisions clearly across technical and non-technical stakeholders BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience, with 5+ years of experience in distributed systems Deep experience with Kubernetes in production - cluster operations, networking, storage, troubleshooting Strong proficiency designing and operating services in AWS (EC2, EKS, RDS, S3, IAM, VPC) Hands-on infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, Helm, or equivalent) Proficiency in at least one backend language (Python, Go, or similar) - you can write production services, not just scripts Experience with CI/CD pipeline design and GitOps workflows Strong understanding of networking fundamentals: DNS, load balancing, TLS, firewall rules, service discovery Excellent communication skills. You can explain a complex system to a room of engineers who didnt build it Experience building internal automation or self-service tooling (Slack bots, CLI tools, workflow orchestration) that reduced manual operational workBS in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience, with 7+ years of experience in distributed systems Experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar messaging systems) Experience with service mesh or API gateway patterns (Istio, Envoy, Kong, or similar) Familiarity with Django/Python web applications and their operational characteristics (Celery, Gunicorn, PostgreSQL) Experience with observability tooling beyond basic monitoring: distributed tracing, SLO frameworks, structured logging Background working with sensitive data (health data, PII) and associated compliance requirements Experience leading incident response and building on-call culture Contributions to internal or open-source infrastructure tooling
We’re a diverse collection of thinkers and doers, continually reimagining what’s possible to help us all do what we love in new ways. The people who work here have reinvented entire industries with the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, as well as with services, including iTunes, the App Store, Apple Music, and Apple Pay. And the same passion for innovation that goes into our products also applies to our practices — strengthening our commitment to leave the world better than we found it.
There’s a place here for every kind of brilliant. Everyone here is an innovator, or an innovator-to-be, no matter what your team or your role. So bring your passion, courage, and original thinking and get ready to share it, because every new product, service, or feature we invent is the result of people working together to make each others’ ideas stronger. Innovation at this level depends on people who represent the variety of the human experience and inspire us with their own fresh perspectives. Together, we’ll do amazing work that can make a difference in people’s lives. Including your own. Learn more about working at Apple.