Site Reliability Engineer, Enterprise Technology Services

Apple•Sunnyvale, CA

About The Position

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. 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.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

Overseeing critical services such as device provisioning, authentication, token management, and security
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)
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
Managing infrastructure, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and auto-failover mechanisms
Monitoring infrastructure and application services, driving incident management for internal and external stakeholders, and defining system and functional observability
Helping teams overcome system bottlenecks and architectural challenges for efficiency improvements
Ensuring systems are compliant with industry standards and pass critical audits
Driving automation solutions for large-scale platform service needs
Alert engineering, anomaly detection with Machine Learning tools, and adapting to Generative AI enhancements
Investigating device-related issues by debugging relevant logs
Managing the full system lifecycle, including configuration and code deployment in user acceptance test and production environments