At Apple, groundbreaking ideas quickly transform into extraordinary products and services that delight millions worldwide. If you’re passionate about engineering and operating robust, large-scale systems, imagine the impact you could make.
The Identity Management Services (IdMS) SRE team is seeking a Service Reliability Engineer (SRE) to design, build tools for, and support our critical platform services. We’re looking for someone with strong software development skills, deep systems expertise, and a solid understanding of SRE principles, ready to ensure operational precision at Apple’s immense scale. Your work will be pivotal in powering services across Apple, partnering with engineering teams to deliver seamless experiences.
Description
This role involves managing one of the largest Identity Management Platform services for a vast customer base across various devices and services. Key responsibilities include overseeing critical services such as device provisioning, authentication, token management, and security. A primary objective is ensuring the high availability and reliability of the system to facilitate critical authentication and authorization transactions, user provisioning, purchases, subscriptions, and account lifecycle management (creation, management, and recovery). This also entails maintaining platform security by blocking and rate-limiting fraud traffic at the perimeter, and ensuring high data consistency and replication across multiple data centers through custom mechanisms. The role covers managing infrastructure, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and auto-failover mechanisms. It also involves monitoring infrastructure and application services, driving incident management for internal and external stakeholders, and defining system and functional observability. Furthermore, this position helps teams overcome system bottlenecks and architectural challenges for efficiency improvements, ensures systems are compliant with industry standards and pass critical audits, and drives automation solutions for large-scale platform service needs. Advanced responsibilities include alert engineering, anomaly detection with Machine Learning tools, and adapting to Generative AI enhancements. Investigating device-related issues by debugging relevant logs is also part of the role, alongside managing the full system lifecycle, including configuration and code deployment in user acceptance test and production environments.
Responsibilities
Drive Platform Reliability & SRE Standards: Lead the optimization of a large-scale Identity Management Platform, ensuring ultra-high availability, reliability, and performance for critical authentication, authorization, and provisioning services. Define and implement robust Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Objectives (SLOs), and Agreements (SLAs) to guide engineering teams toward ambitious reliability and observability goals. Architect & Engineer Resilient Systems: Design, build, and manage robust, distributed systems across cloud and on-premise infrastructure. Develop advanced capacity planning, disaster recovery, auto-failover, and data consistency mechanisms. Innovate by creating reusable tooling, automation frameworks, and advanced reliability platforms covering observability, alerting, chaos testing, auto-scaling, and failover strategies. Lead Operational Excellence & Incident Management: Drive comprehensive operational excellence through advanced observability (tracing, logging, metrics, alerting) and next-generation telemetry, leveraging Machine Learning for anomaly detection and exploring GenAI for alert engineering. Lead technical response during major incidents, conducting deep post-mortems, driving systemic improvements, and embedding preventive architectural controls. Champion Automation & Resilience Engineering: Develop and implement large-scale automation solutions, internal tooling, and frameworks to enhance reliability, cost-efficiency, and operational visibility. Advance resilience engineering by integrating automation pipelines, CI/CD, canary releases, and chaos engineering principles into core development and deployment workflows. Drive initiatives to eliminate toil and contribute to multi-cloud strategy. Ensure Security & Compliance: Maintain the highest security posture, implementing fraud prevention at the perimeter, and ensuring strict adherence to industry compliance standards (e.g., ISO-27001, PCI). Uphold all architectural and operational practices to rigorously meet security standards, compliance requirements, and audit readiness protocols. Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner extensively with engineering, production support, and QA teams to ensure seamless service delivery. Promote a strong DevOps culture and provide technical insights through log analysis and system debugging.
Minimum Qualifications
5+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering with a strong focus on building, scaling, and operating large-scale distributed platform services, and Java. BS degree in computer science or equivalent field with 7+ years of experience or MS degree in computer science or equivalent field with 5+ years of experience. Strong technical grasp and experience working on Open Source technologies designed for large-scale data processing. Experience designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting distributed systems. Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language (Python, Java, Go, Bash, Ansible, or similar). Experience designing observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK, etc.). Excellent troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.
Preferred Qualifications
Observability & SRE Principles: Experience with monitoring and logging tools (e.g., Prometheus, Splunk, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and a strong understanding of SRE principles, including observability, error budgeting, and service reliability metrics (SLA, SLO, SLI). CI/CD & Automation: Proficiency with CI/CD, Release Engineering, DevOps practices, and source control (Git). Experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (Helm, CRD). Programming & Data Systems: Strong programming skills in languages like Java, Python, Go, etc. Experience with various databases (Relational, NoSQL, OLAP) and event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ). Reliability & Operations: Experience with on-call, including incident/problem management (PIR, RCA) and a strong sense of ownership for system reliability. Security & Compliance: Understanding of security standards, policies, cryptography, and authentication (OAuth, SAML, SSO). Knowledge of Governance and Compliance. Innovation & Collaboration: Passion for designing reliable systems, advocating for automation, and a desire to collaborate effectively. Experience leveraging ML/GenAI for operational efficiency is a plus. Certification: Cybersecurity certification will be an added advantage. Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $212,000 and $318,400, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.
Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs. Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan. You’ll also receive benefits including: Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation. Learn more about Apple Benefits
Note: Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.
Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant
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Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.