Site Reliability Engineer — Human Engineering

Apple • Cupertino, CA

8h

About The Position

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 there's 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. We're looking
for a Site Reliability Engineer who thinks like a systems engineer first and an
operator second. You won't just keep things running — you'll 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. You'll spend as much time designing systems as
operating them. You'll work closely with our full-stack engineers to improve how
services communicate, how we observe production behavior, and how we ship
changes safely. You'll have a seat at the architecture table — we want you
proposing solutions, not just implementing them.

Requirements

• BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience, with 3+ 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 didn't build it
• Experience building internal automation or self-service tooling (Slack bots, CLI tools, workflow orchestration) that reduced manual operational work

Nice To Haves

• BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience, with 5+ 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees