ASE Compute - Senior SRE Software Engineer

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple Service Engineering (ASE) seeks a senior SRE software engineer to own the architectural direction of Kubernetes internals powering Apple services. You will define controllers and namespace management, raise reliability, and contribute to upstream Kubernetes.

The role includes mentoring and building AI-assisted tooling for triage and automation. You will drive SLOs, incident response, and runbooks while collaborating with cross-functional teams to shape the Compute roadmap and ensure scale.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, engineering-related field, or equivalent related experience.
• Excellent verbal and written communication. Ability to present designs and influence leadership.
• Deep experience building and operating core Kubernetes components (apiserver, etcd, scheduler, kubelet, controller-runtime).
• Demonstrated ownership of a technical area end-to-end from design to production.
• Expert-level Golang with a track record shipping controllers/operators used by teams.
• Mentoring, design reviews, and building tools to raise engineering capability.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and technical direction for controllers and namespace management infrastructure at global scale.
• Find and fix reliability problems beyond upstream defaults; automate and harden the platform.
• Set platform reliability standards: SLOs, error budgets, alerts, upgrades, and runbooks.
• Lead on-call and incident response; drive post-incident improvements.
• Represent Apple upstream in Kubernetes community and drive requirements through design proposals.
• Grow engineers through review and mentoring; lead cross-team technical efforts.
• Advise partner service teams on platform capabilities and trade-offs, shaping Compute roadmap.

Skills

Verbal and written communication

Kubernetes/OSS ownership

End-to-end ownership

Golang

Mentoring & design reviews

Education

Bachelor's Degree in CS or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Thanos

Grafana

Job description

People at Apple don't just build products, they craft the kind of experience that has revolutionized entire industries. The diverse collection of our people and their ideas inspire innovation in everything we do. Imagine what you could do here! Join Apple, and help us leave the world better than we found it. The Apple Service Engineering (ASE) team builds and provides systems and infrastructure that power Apple's services (such as iCloud, Apple Music, Apple Intelligence, and Maps). We are the foundation on which Apple's software developers build the products that our customers love. Our services have to scale globally, stay highly available, and "just work." If you love designing, engineering, and running systems and infrastructure that will help millions of customers, then this is the place for you!

Description

The ASE Compute team is looking for a senior SRE software engineer to own the technical direction of the Kubernetes internals that Apple's services run on. You will set the architecture for our controllers and namespace management infrastructure, strengthen the reliability of our Kubernetes services, and engage with the upstream community to drive Apple's requirements. You will write the hardest parts yourself, and raise what the rest of the team can build through design review, mentoring, and the tools you build. Service teams across Apple will come to you as the technical authority on what the platform can do and where it is going. The role also offers room to build AI-assisted tooling that accelerates triage, operational workflows, and infrastructure automation for the whole team.

• Own the architecture and technical direction for our controllers and namespace management infrastructure, from design through production operation at global scale.
• Find and fix the reliability problems that only appear past the point where upstream defaults and community guidance stop working, build each fix into the platform so the same class of problem does not come back, and automate the operational load that cannot be designed away.
• Set the reliability standards for the platform: SLOs, error budgets, alerting philosophy, upgrade and rollout strategy, and the runbooks that follow from them.
• Take on-call, lead incident response for the hardest production issues, and see the post‑incident follow‑up work through so the same incident does not happen twice.
• Represent Apple in the upstream Kubernetes community, driving our requirements through design proposals and code in the relevant SIGs.
• Grow the engineers around you through design review, code review, and direct mentoring.
• Lead cross‑team technical efforts through ambiguity, and advise partner service teams and their leadership on platform capabilities and trade‑offs, shaping both their designs and the Compute roadmap.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, an engineering‑related field, or equivalent related experience.
• Excellent verbal and written communication. You can write a design, iterate on it with the team, and present it to leadership in a way that clearly outlines the problem, solution, and impact.
• Deep experience building and operating core components of Kubernetes or a comparable orchestration system in production at scale: apiserver, etcd, scheduler, kubelet, controller‑runtime, and the failure modes of the distributed Unix systems underneath them.
• Demonstrated ownership of a technical area end to end: you set the design, saw it through to production, and stayed accountable for how it behaved.
• Expert‑level Golang, with a track record of shipping and owning controllers or operators that other teams depend on.
• Track record of raising the level of engineers around you through mentoring, design review, and the systems and tools you build.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading a technical effort spanning several teams with competing priorities and no clear owner at the start.
• Experience defining SLOs and error budgets that other teams adopted.
• Accepted contributions to upstream Kubernetes or a comparable open source project, or sustained participation in a SIG or working group.
• Deep familiarity with cloud‑native observability such as Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, or similar.
• Experience building AI‑assisted tooling that other engineers adopted for triage, operational workflows, or infrastructure automation.