Staff Software Engineer, ASE Storage Infrastructure

Apple • Seattle, WA

1d

About The Position

Apple Services Engineering (ASE) designs, builds, and operates the cloud infrastructure, server systems, and platform technologies that power many of Apple's most beloved experiences. Within ASE, the Storage Platforms organization develops the systems that store, protect, and serve Apple's data at massive scale, with a mission to deliver storage that is durable, secure, highly available, and operated with excellence. Engineers on this team will have the rare opportunity to work on storage device-optimized low-level storage, large-scale distributed systems, and high-performance IO stacks operating at mission-critical levels of availability and durability. Elastic Disk provides foundational block storage services to Apple's compute platforms. We are building a next-generation block storage system designed from the ground up for low latency, high availability, and strong durability — serving as a critical building block for compute workloads across Apple. We are looking for a passionate lead engineer/architect with experience in developing large-scale services and infrastructure to take a central role in designing and building our next version. Join our friendly, collaborative, highly-motivated team!

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional software development experience building infrastructure, systems, or distributed services
• 5+ years designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed storage or database systems in production
• Deep expertise in at least one systems-level language; strong Rust, C++, or C proficiency preferred
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems — proven ability to reason about correctness under concurrency and failure; meticulous attention to detail
• Experience owning services through the full lifecycle: design, implementation, rollout, on-call, and incident response, with measurable availability and durability SLOs
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related engineering field, or equivalent experience

Nice To Haves

• MS or PhD in Computer Science or a related field
• Strong storage and database background — having led or been a core contributor to a distributed storage system, database, or storage engine at scale
• Hands-on experience implementing or extending consensus protocols (Raft, Paxos, Multi-Paxos, ZAB, Viewstamped Replication) in production
• Experience building block storage, distributed file systems, distributed databases, or replicated storage engines at scale (e.g., EBS-class systems, Ceph, HDFS, Pangu, GFS-family, Spanner, CockroachDB, FoundationDB)
• Deep knowledge of data durability techniques: replication, erasure coding, scrubbers, silent-corruption detection, and automated repair/reconstruction
• Track record of driving cross-org technical initiatives or shared platform abstractions across multiple teams

Responsibilities

• Own the technical vision for the Replication & Metadata Systems powering Elastic Disk
• Evolve our replication protocol to strengthen availability, correctness, durability to improve the overall reliability of the service as we scale
• Advance end-to-end durability: next-generation repair, replica reconstruction, continuous scrubbing, replication-metadata checksums, and point-in-time backup & snapshot
• Drive performance of the replication and network data path — profiling bottlenecks and evaluating next-gen network stacks to keep replication off the critical latency path
• Raise the engineering bar through best practices of AI toolings and insist on high standards for reviews and testing
• Represent the team in cross-org efforts to shape a unified replication foundation for Apple's storage backends
• Mentor and grow engineers; lead through design reviews, technical writing, and hands-on collaboration with storage engine, control plane, compute platform, and storage reliability partners

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior