Principal Software Engineer - Apple Data Platform

Apple

21h

About The Position

As the founding principal engineer for Apple Data Platform in China, you will establish and evolve the regional platform that supports data, analytics, and AI workloads. This is a greenfield opportunity to build a new engineering capability while contributing to a strategic infrastructure initiative. You will own the architecture, implementation, deployment, and operation of core platform services, ensuring they meet regional operational, security, regulatory, and data-residency requirements. Working closely with Apple Data Platform teams in China and the United States, you will deliver global capabilities, maintain feature parity with the global platform, and shape the architecture to support customers across China. As the senior-most individual contributor, you will set technical direction and engineering standards, drive reliability and operational excellence, and provide technical leadership to senior and staff engineers as the organization grows.

Requirements

15+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or platform technologies in production.
A track record of owning architecture and delivering complex infrastructure or platform initiatives across multiple engineering organizations.
Expert-level software engineering experience in Java, Go, Scala, Python, C++, or similar programming languages.
Deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes, container orchestration, networking, and modern infrastructure platforms.
A proven history of building and operating highly available, scalable, secure, and observable production systems at scale.
Experience designing automation for deployment, infrastructure management, and operational excellence.
Exceptional debugging and problem-solving skills in complex production environments.
Experience setting technical direction across software engineering, infrastructure, SRE, security, and product organizations.
Excellent communication skills and a record of influencing technical direction across globally distributed engineering organizations.
BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience architecting large-scale data, analytics, AI, or machine-learning platforms.
Experience with Kubernetes, Spark, Ray, Kafka, Trino, Iceberg, Airflow, or other modern data platform technologies.
Experience deploying and operating platforms on public cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud, AWS, or GCP, as well as in private cloud or on-premises environments.
Experience founding greenfield infrastructure or platform initiatives.
Experience operating services in regulated environments with security, compliance, and data-residency requirements.
Experience building developer platforms, platform automation, and self-service infrastructure.
Passion for building world-class infrastructure and helping establish a new engineering organization from the ground up.

Responsibilities

Own the design, implementation, deployment, and operation of core Apple Data Platform components in China.
Set the technical design and architecture of platform services and shape their alignment with the global Apple Data Platform architecture.
Partner with engineering teams in China and the United States to deliver platform capabilities and maintain feature parity with the global platform.
Establish standards for reliability, scalability, security, and operational excellence across platform services and infrastructure.
Develop infrastructure automation, deployment tools, and operational workflows to simplify platform management and improve engineering productivity.
Resolve complex distributed systems challenges involving cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, storage, and data platform services.
Improve observability, monitoring, incident response, automation, and operational efficiency.
Collaborate with engineering, infrastructure, security, product, and SRE teams across Apple.
Own multi-year technical strategy and architectural direction, and establish engineering standards and best practices for the China engineering organization.
Develop senior and staff engineers through architecture and code reviews, design discussions, and day-to-day technical leadership.