Lead Architect, Foundation Model Compute Infra

Apple, Inc.; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 216,000 - 394,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock programs

Relocation assistance

Education reimbursement

Comprehensive medical and dental

Job summary

Apple is hiring for a Senior Staff/Principal Engineer on the Foundation Model Compute Infrastructure team in Santa Clara. You will architect, build, and run large-scale infrastructure powering foundation model training, inference, and RL environments, collaborating with cloud and hardware partners and researchers to push performance, reliability, and developer productivity.

This hands-on technical leadership role requires delivering production-grade code, guiding architecture decisions, and

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing distributed systems or large-scale infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and cloud production systems.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or C++ for infrastructure.
• Experience with accelerator infrastructure and ML training or inference workloads.
• Excellent written and verbal communication for collaboration across teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead by example through hands-on coding, debugging, and solving architecture problems.
• Design and build distributed scheduling, quota, and capacity management systems.
• Improve fault tolerance, reliability, and recovery for large‑scale workloads.
• Architect and operate Kubernetes-based infrastructure, including autoscaling.
• Collaborate with cloud and hardware partners to qualify and deploy TPU/AI hardware.
• Design and operate secure sandbox infrastructure for untrusted code and RL environments.
• Build self-service tools, APIs, and observability for job submission and monitoring.
• Develop scalable services for foundation model fine-tuning and inference.
• Partner with researchers and security teams to translate requirements into robust infra.
• Mentor engineers and drive architectural best practices across the team.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Cloud infrastructure

Python

Go

C++

Technical leadership

Communication

Tools

JAX

XLA

Job description

Apple is hiring for a Senior Staff/Principal Engineer on the Foundation Model Compute Infrastructure team in Santa Clara. You will architect, build, and run large-scale infrastructure powering foundation model training, inference, and RL environments, collaborating with cloud and hardware partners and researchers to push performance, reliability, and developer productivity.

This hands-on technical leadership role requires delivering production-grade code, guiding architecture decisions, and