Distributed DB Engineer: Auto-Balancing & Multi-Tenant

Apple; Greater London; On-site; GBP 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple is seeking a deeply technical Distributed Systems Database Engineer to architect the next generation of our massive-scale data platform. The ASE Data Services team operates Cassandra and related coordination systems across Apple's datacenters to support iCloud and hundreds of millions of users.

You will design and build an intelligent, auto-balancing cluster control plane that optimizes hardware footprint while maintaining reliable, low-latency data service.

Qualifications

• BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent work experience.
• 7+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering, systems programming, or distributed systems development.
• Professional experience developing distributed systems (consensus protocols, replication strategies or consistency models).
• Experience profiling and modeling node-level resource usage (e.g., CPU, memory, I/O).
• Bias toward experimentation, you form hypotheses, prototype quickly, measure honestly, and let data settle the hard architectural questions.

Responsibilities

• Auto-Balancing Control Plane: design and implement automated cluster balancing software.
• Streaming Load Optimization: architect rebalancing mechanisms for heavy data streaming operations.
• Multi-Tenant Architecture: design robust multi-tenancy frameworks with isolation.
• Resource Modeling & Capacity Engineering: develop models for CPU, memory, IOPS, and bandwidth.
• Quota Management & Rate Limiting: build global/local quota and admission control systems.
• Failure Domain Isolation: enforce boundary controls across infrastructure and datacenters.
• Cross-Team Delivery: collaborate with SRE, platform, and integration teams for production reliability.

Skills

Distributed systems

Resource modeling

Experimentation mindset

Infrastructure engineering

SRE collaboration

Education

BS or MS in Computer Science/Engineering

Tools

Kubernetes

Linux cgroups

eBPF

I/O schedulers

Java

Job description

Apple is seeking a deeply technical Distributed Systems Database Engineer to architect the next generation of our massive-scale data platform. The ASE Data Services team operates Cassandra and related coordination systems across Apple's datacenters to support iCloud and hundreds of millions of users.

You will design and build an intelligent, auto-balancing cluster control plane that optimizes hardware footprint while maintaining reliable, low-latency data service.