Staff Software Engineer, Object Storage, London

Apple Inc.; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Object Storage in London to lead architecture and drive large-scale storage initiatives. You will own multi-tenant isolation, durability, performance, and scalability while shaping platform direction across teams.

You will mentor engineers, tackle complex, ambiguous problems end-to-end, and influence design choices that affect hundreds of internal services at exabyte scale. This role sits in a high-impact cloud storage group in London.

Qualifications

• In-depth backend software engineering experience with CS fundamentals.
• Experience designing, building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Ability to drive complex technical projects end-to-end and collaborate across teams.

Responsibilities

• Identify and lead major projects impacting reliability, performance, and scalability of the storage platform.
• Drive architecture and design decisions and represent direction in cross-team discussions.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar in testing and observability.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Networking

Filesystems

Tools

Observability tools

Load balancing

Job description

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Staff Software Engineer, Object Storage, London

London Metro Area, Greater London, United Kingdom Software and Services

Join the Apple Cloud Object Store team as a software engineer to help lead the development of one of Apple's largest storage platforms — used by hundreds of internal services at exabyte scale. You'll take ownership of some of the hardest problems in large-scale distributed storage: from keeping thousands of tenants fairly and safely sharing the same infrastructure, to improving durability, performance, and scalability as the platform continues to grow. This is a role for an engineer who can drive complex, ambiguous technical problems end-to-end and shape the direction of the platform, not just execute against a fixed spec.

Description

Operating a shared storage platform at exabyte scale means constantly balancing competing demands: keep the system fast and available for everyone, protect it from any single tenant's traffic, and keep evolving the architecture without disrupting the services built on top of it. As a lead engineer on this team, you'll help set direction across several of these areas, including:Multi-tenant isolation and fairness. Keeping thousands of tenants safely sharing the same infrastructure — enforcing quotas, shaping and rate limiting traffic, and containing the blast radius when one tenant's behavior threatens to degrade everyone else.Availability and durability at scale. Designing for hardware and component failure as a constant, not an edge case, while keeping data durable and available across a massive, distributed fleet.Performance and efficiency. Finding and eliminating bottlenecks in a complex system, and making sure optimization effort goes where it has the most impact.Architectural evolution. Retiring legacy approaches, simplifying fragmented systems, and making large-scale changes safely in a system that can't afford downtime.You can find out more about our work here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast26/presentation/baron

Responsibilities

• Identify, scope, and lead major projects that materially impact the reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability of the storage platform.
• Drive architecture and design decisions in your focus area — for example, how rate limiting and quota enforcement are structured across the platform — and represent that direction in cross-team design reviews and roadmap discussions.
• Work across teams to identify improvement areas, build consensus, and turn ambiguous problems into concrete, sequenced plans.
• Mentor other engineers and raise the technical bar for the team, including in areas like testing, observability, and operational readiness.
• Take on new problem areas across the storage platform as priorities shift, applying the same depth of ownership regardless of the specific domain.

Minimum Qualifications

• In-depth experience as a backend software engineer with a strong grasp of computer science fundamentals: networking, filesystems, security concepts.
• Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, with a strong grasp of concepts like availability, congestion control, observability, and fault tolerance.
• Experience driving complex, ambiguous technical projects end-to-end and collaborating across teams to build consensus.
• Experience with at least one of: multi-tenant resource isolation, rate limiting, or quota systems; large-scale storage systems; or distributed systems performance/reliability work.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with flow control, overload protection, or admission-control systems (e.g., adaptive throttling, load shedding, backpressure).
• Experience with object storage systems or similar backend storage engines.
• Experience building observability/telemetry that makes complex system behavior explainable to engineers or customers.
• Familiarity with distributed state-propagation protocols (e.g., gossip protocols).
• Familiarity with modern data lake architectures and query engines

At Apple, we're not all the same. And that's our greatest strength. We draw on the differences in who we are, what we've experienced and how we think. Because to create products that serve everyone, we believe in including everyone. Therefore, we are committed to treating all applicants fairly and equally. As a registered Disability Confident employer, we will work with applicants to make any reasonable accommodations. Apple will consider for employment all qualified applicants with criminal backgrounds in a manner consistent with applicable law. Learn more

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