Senior Distributed DB Engineer: Auto-Balancing & Multi-Tenant

Apple Inc.; Greater London; On-site; GBP 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple Inc. in London is seeking a highly technical Core Distributed Systems Database Engineer to design and build the next-generation large-scale data platform.

You will own auto-balancing, capacity modeling, and multi-tenant isolation across Apple’s fleet, collaborating with SRE, platform, and product teams. The role focuses on designing a scalable control plane, performance optimizations, and reliable, self-balancing distributed storage systems for iCloud-scale workloads in a multi-datacenter

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.
• 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)
• A 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 that dynamically redistributes data and workloads across the fleet, optimizing for criteria like node count while ensuring safe thresholds for CPU, memory, and network utilization.
• Streaming Load Optimization: Architect rebalancing mechanisms that safely throttle and schedule heavy data streaming operations to prevent live production traffic degradation.
• Multi-Tenant Architecture: Design and implement robust multi-tenancy frameworks within our distributed storage systems, ensuring hard isolation, tenant safety, and zero noisy-neighbor impact.
• Resource Modeling & Capacity Engineering: Develop algorithmic models to accurately estimate and forecast CPU, memory, IOPS, and network bandwidth requirements per node that tracks evolving data workloads.
• Quota Management & Rate Limiting: Build and maintain global and local quota management systems, dynamic rate-limiting, and admission control systems to protect cluster health.
• Failure Domain Isolation: Reason about and implement strict boundary controls across diverse infrastructure, factoring in cross-datacenter connectivity, host placement strategies, and cloud/bare-metal failure domains.
• Cross-Team Delivery: Partner closely with SRE, platform, and integration teams to ship, operate, and harden this system in production from design through on-call-grade reliability.

Skills

Distributed systems

Resource modeling

Performance tuning

Experimentation mindset

Education

BS/MS in CS/CE

Tools

Kubernetes

Linux

Java

Job description

Apple Inc. in London is seeking a highly technical Core Distributed Systems Database Engineer to design and build the next-generation large-scale data platform.

You will own auto-balancing, capacity modeling, and multi-tenant isolation across Apple’s fleet, collaborating with SRE, platform, and product teams. The role focuses on designing a scalable control plane, performance optimizations, and reliable, self-balancing distributed storage systems for iCloud-scale workloads in a multi-datacenter