ASE Observability SRE - Seattle

Apple Inc.; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 142,000 - 263,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Discretionary bonuses or commissions

Relocation assistance

Educational expense reimbursement

Comprehensive medical & dental

Job summary

Apple seeks an experienced Site Reliability Engineer for Observability to scale customer-facing services. You will own performance SLIs/SLOs, optimize production environments across data centers and AliCloud, and drive automated, zero-downtime deployments.

You’ll build dashboards with Prometheus, Grafana, and Splunk, with a focus on automation and cost efficiency at planetary scale. Join a team tackling uptime for iCloud, iTunes, Siri, and Maps, collaborating across engineering to deliver

Qualifications

• B.S. in Computer Science or related field.
• 10+ years industry experience; 5+ years in SRE/DevOps for external production-grade services.
• Production-grade Python scripting; Bash, Go, Rust exposure a plus.
• Kubernetes, container orchestration, and CI/CD tooling experience.
• Terraform for IaC; Pulumi experience a plus; Spinnaker familiarity.
• Experience with Prometheus ecosystem; ownership mindset and strong communication.
• Incident response and problem-solving across complex systems.

Responsibilities

• Own and defend availability, latency, and performance metrics (SLIs/SLOs) for production services.
• Maintain and optimise production environments including AliCloud services and Apple infrastructure.
• Manage external networking, CDN, and global traffic routing for low latency.
• Maintain zero-downtime deployments; support CI/CD pipelines; Spinnaker a plus.
• Build observability dashboards and alerting with Prometheus, Grafana, and Splunk.
• Implement automated scaling rules and optimize infrastructure spend.
• Lead incident response and root-cause analyses across teams.

Skills

Python scripting

Go/Rust exposure

Bash scripting

Kubernetes experience

Terraform

Pulumi

Spinnaker

Helm

Prometheus ecosystem

Grafana

Splunk / log tooling

Incident response

Automation & CI/CD

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

Master's degree (preferred)

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Pulumi

Spinnaker

Helm

Prometheus

Grafana

Splunk / Log Service

Job description

Seattle, Washington, United States Software and Services

People at Apple don't just build products - they craft the kind of experiences that have revolutionised 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 fuel Apple's services (such as iCloud, iTunes, Siri, and Maps). We are the foundation on which Apple's software developers build the products that our customers love. We are looking for passionate and talented Site Reliability Engineers to continue our focus on providing our customers the highest quality Apple Services experience. Our services have to scale globally, stay highly available, and "just work." If you love designing, engineering, and running systems and infrastructure that help millions of customers, this is the place for you!The Observability SRE organisation is specifically tasked with enabling other teams to better understand their infrastructure and services, providing world-class observability capabilities. Keeping Apple services up and running 100% of the time is a challenging job. Accurately monitoring the health of every application and infrastructure that comprises the Apple ecosystem 100% of the time is an order of magnitude more challenging. As a Site Reliability Engineer on the Observability Team, you will champion the availability, performance, and scaling of customer-facing production services, ensuring customers worldwide experience seamless, lightning-fast, and uninterrupted service. Our monitoring, alerting, and visualisation platform analyses billions of metrics per minute and comprises the central nervous system of Apple's architecture. You will work shoulder-to-shoulder with engineering teams to design and build the next generation of cloud and systems monitoring infrastructure, focusing on automation, availability, performance, and efficiency at "reach every user on the planet" scale.

Description

Apple Services Engineering infrastructure is BIG. Operating at our scale, across multiple geographically dispersed data centers (including AliCloud regions serving China-mainland and global markets) and servicing hundreds of millions of users presents unique challenges. As an SRE at Apple, you'll solve these problems using data, teamwork, and your own expertise. SREs at Apple own the full infrastructure stack - from device driver performance debugging to content delivery network traffic management - our responsibilities are both broad and deep. ASE runs the majority of its systems on Linux, using a mix of open source, vendor-licensed, and internally developed tools for system configuration management, provisioning, software deployment, logging, and monitoring. You'll learn these tools and have opportunities to improve them.

Responsibilities

• * Customer SLA/SLO Delivery: Own, monitor, and defend the availability, latency, and performance metrics (SLIs/SLOs) of customer-facing production services.
• * Production Management: Maintain and optimise customer-serving production environments, including AliCloud services (ACK Kubernetes, ECS, Serverless, RDS) alongside Apple's own infrastructure.
• * Global Traffic Routing: Manage external-facing networking, content delivery, and load balancing (SLB/ALB, Global Traffic Manager, AliCloud CDN) to ensure minimal latency for users worldwide.
• * Deployment & CI/CD: Maintain zero-downtime deployment pipelines so new features ship safely and continuously without disrupting customer workflows. Spinnaker experience a plus.
• * Proactive Observability: Build customer-centric dashboards and alerting frameworks using Prometheus, Grafana, and Splunk (or similar Log Service) to catch and resolve user-facing issues before they generate support tickets.
• * Scalability & Cost Optimisation: Implement automated scaling rules to handle peak customer traffic spikes efficiently while managing infrastructure spend.
• * Incident Response: Drive incident response and management for production systems, conducting deep root-cause analysis across software, systems, automation, and process.

Minimum Qualifications

• * B.S. in Computer Science or a related field.
• * Minimum 10+ years of industry experience (5+ years in an SRE/DevOps role supporting external, production-grade web services, APIs, or SaaS applications).
• * Proven experience developing production-grade software in Python (scripting/automation proficiency in Python, and scripting in Bash, Go and Rust exposure a plus).
• * Hands-on experience deploying and operating user-facing applications, with strong container orchestration experience (or equivalent Kubernetes experience).
• * Solid experience using Terraform for infrastructure-as-code and version-controlled production environments. Pulumi experience a plus.
• * Experience/knowledge with the Prometheus ecosystem.
• * Strong sense of ownership and integrity, demonstrated through clear communication and collaboration.
• * Experience and confidence around incident response and incident management.
• * Acute drive to automate manual operations and improve them through repeated iteration.
• * Comfortable with open-source configuration management and orchestration tools (Helm, Pulumi, Terraform, Spinnaker).

Preferred Qualifications

• * Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• * Experience managing client data persistence, backups, and failovers using cloud databases (RDS MySQL, PostgreSQL, or PolarDB).
• * Demonstrated ability to investigate complex systemic/latent reliability issues cross-functionally.
• * Prior on-call experience supporting large-scale, distributed systems.
• * Collaborating with a global and asynchronously communicating team.

At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $142,300 and $263,300, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.

• Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple's discretionary employee stock programs.
• Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in Apple's Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
• You'll also receive benefits including: Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses - including tuition.
• Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation.
• Learn more about Apple Benefits

Note: Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant

At Apple, we believe accessibility is a fundamental human right. You'll find that idea reflected in everything here - in our culture, our benefits and our digital tools. By welcoming as many perspectives as possible, we help you build a career where you feel like you belong.

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Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.