ASE Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Apple Inc.; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 277,600; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical and dental coverage

Retirement benefits

Stock programs

Employee stock purchase plan

Discounted products

Educational expense reimbursement

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Apple is seeking an experienced Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to ensure availability, performance, and scalability of its services. The role involves end-to-end ownership from design to production, with a strong emphasis on automation and reducing toil across distributed systems.

You will work with Software Engineering, Security, and Infrastructure teams to embed reliability in the software lifecycle and participate in on-call rotations and incident responses.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in CS/Engineering.
• 5+ years of experience designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems.
• 2+ years of experience leading technical projects and providing engineering leadership.

Responsibilities

• Own the full service lifecycle from inception and architecture through deployment, operations, and continuous improvement.
• Monitor, measure, and maintain service health across availability, latency, and performance dimensions.
• Drive automation to reduce toil and improve scalability in production environments.
• Lead on-call rotations and contribute to blameless postmortems.

Skills

Programming skills (Python/Go/Java)

Shell scripting

Education

Master's degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent

Tools

Observability tooling

CI/CD pipelines

Kubernetes

Job description

The Apple Services Engineering (ASE) team is one of the most exciting examples of Apple's long-held passion for combining art and technology. These are the people who power the App Store, Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Apple Books. And they do it on a massive scale, meeting Apple's high expectations with high performance to deliver a huge variety of entertainment in over 35 languages to more than 150 countries. These engineers build secure, end-to-end solutions. They develop the custom software used to process all the creative work, the tools that providers use to deliver that media, all the server-side systems, and the APIs for many Apple services. Thanks to Apple's unique integration of hardware, software, and services, engineers here partner to get behind a single unified vision. That vision always includes a deep commitment to strengthening Apple's privacy policy, one of Apple's core values. Although services are a bigger part of Apple's business than ever before, these teams remain small, forward-thinking, and cross-functional, offering greater exposure to the array of opportunities here.

Description

As an SRE, your mission is to ensure these services are always available, performant, and ready for growth. You will solve complex problems at scale, develop deep troubleshooting expertise, and keep a relentless focus on availability, latency, performance, and capacity. You will drive a culture of operational excellence by replacing toil with automation and by building systems that are resilient by design.

Responsibilities

• Own the full service lifecycle from inception and architecture through deployment, operations, and continuous improvement
• Partner with cross-functional teams to prepare services for production through system design consulting, deployment strategy, capacity planning, and production readiness reviews
• Monitor, measure, and maintain service health across availability, latency, and performance dimensions
• Drive sustainable scalability through automation and tooling, reducing manual operational overhead
• Participate in on-call rotations, lead production incident response, and contribute to blameless postmortems
• Establish and champion operational excellence practices across the organization
• Collaborate closely with Software Engineering, Program Management, Security, and Infrastructure teams to embed reliability throughout the software development lifecycle

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in Computer Science or Engineering
• Experience with observability tooling, SLOs/SLIs, and capacity planning at scale
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines
• Proven track record of driving automation to reduce operational toil in high-traffic production environments

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of experience designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems
• 2+ years of experience leading technical projects and providing engineering leadership
• Strong programming or scripting skills (e.g., Python, Go, or Java, and shell scripting)

Pay & Benefits

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 $150,400 and $277,600, 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
• 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.