Network Reliability Engineer, Infrastructure Services

Apple Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 185,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock programs

Relocation assistance

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Apple Inc. in San Francisco, CA, is seeking a Network Reliability Engineer to drive reliability across Apple’s global networking platforms.

You will lead architecture for control/data plane systems, champion fault‑tolerance, and define SRE practices across multi‑region deployments. You will collaborate with IS&T Infrastructure Services, partner with engineering and operations, and push observability, automation, and scalable network solutions to ensure high availability and performance for

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in software engineering, systems engineering, or infrastructure engineering.
• Strong background in designing, operating, and supporting highly available, fault‑tolerant distributed systems at hyper scale.
• Strong systems programming skills including multi‑threading, concurrency, caching, batching.
• Solid understanding of network infrastructure and software‑defined networking (SDN).
• Ability to lead cross‑functional collaboration and influence technical decisions across teams.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term technical vision, architecture, and reliability strategy for large-scale cloud networking platforms spanning control plane and data plane systems.
• Architect and evolve fault‑tolerant, highly available network services, ensuring graceful degradation and consistent performance under partial and systemic failure scenarios.
• Establish platform‑wide resiliency patterns including service discovery, health checking, automated failover, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and traffic management across multi‑region and multi‑cloud environments.
• Lead the design of network configuration management, routing state distribution, traffic engineering, and capacity planning systems, balancing scalability, correctness, and operational simplicity.
• Serve as a senior technical authority and architectural reviewer, influencing critical design decisions across multiple teams and ensuring network failure modes are explicitly addressed.
• Build and champion automation‑first reliability solutions, including topology discovery, deployment safety mechanisms, self‑healing systems, and operational tooling that reduce toil and improve MTTR.
• Define and own reliability metrics and observability standards (SLIs, SLOs, error budgets), using data to drive engineering trade‑offs, reliability investments, and incident response improvements.
• Multiply impact through cross‑team technical leadership, embedding reliability early in design, mentoring engineers, and sharing deep technical knowledge through documentation and technical talks.

Skills

Software engineering

Distributed systems

SDN

Cross-functional collaboration

Systems programming

Tools

Kubernetes

OpenStack

Infrastructure as Code

Job description

Network Reliability Engineer, Infrastructure Services

San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States Software and Services

Do you want to help build some of the largest and most consequential enterprise and customer technology systems in the world? Join Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization.IS&T is the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. It’s Apple’s central nervous system. Supporting 2.5 billion active Apple devices, processing billions of secure transactions, and keeping the technology that defines modern life running flawlessly, IS&T makes the impossible feel effortless.”Do you love building solutions to handle global complexity and immense scale? Imagine what you could do here.Infrastructure Services is part of IS&T and the foundation of Apple's global network operations — managing data center equipment and systems to deliver compute, storage, and networking services for teams across Apple, including its internal developer community. From individual facilities to a worldwide network, Infrastructure Services ensures the technology underneath everything works without question.

Description

We are seeking an experienced and visionary Network Reliability Engineer to drive the technical strategy and execution for ensuring the availability, performance, scalability, and resiliency of Apple's global network services. In this role, you will work as a technical leader solving complex networking challenges at massive scale, partnering with engineering, infrastructure, and operations teams across Apple to deliver reliable, fault-tolerant systems.As a technical leader within the Cloud Networking organization, you will define and drive the reliability and resiliency architecture for Apple's network platform services. You will be responsible for establishing SRE and SWE best practices, architecting fault-tolerant network control and data planes, and championing data-driven decision‑making through observability and automation.You will drive resilient cloud networking solutions that operate reliably across multiple cloud providers and global regions, handling failures gracefully and maintaining service availability. Your technical leadership will ensure Apple's network services meet demanding availability, latency, resilience, and security requirements while continuously improving operational maturity.We are looking for a technical expert who deeply understands cloud networking at scale, is passionate about operating mission‑critical, globally distributed infrastructure, preventing outages through proactive engineering, and driving long‑term reliability improvements through architectural excellence.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term technical vision, architecture, and reliability strategy for large-scale cloud networking platforms spanning control plane and data plane systems.
• Architect and evolve fault‑tolerant, highly available network services, ensuring graceful degradation and consistent performance under partial and systemic failure scenarios.
• Establish platform‑wide resiliency patterns including service discovery, health checking, automated failover, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and traffic management across multi‑region and multi‑cloud environments.
• Lead the design of network configuration management, routing state distribution, traffic engineering, and capacity planning systems, balancing scalability, correctness, and operational simplicity.
• Serve as a senior technical authority and architectural reviewer, influencing critical design decisions across multiple teams and ensuring network failure modes are explicitly addressed.
• Build and champion automation‑first reliability solutions, including topology discovery, deployment safety mechanisms, self‑healing systems, and operational tooling that reduce toil and improve MTTR.
• Define and own reliability metrics and observability standards (SLIs, SLOs, error budgets), using data to drive engineering trade‑offs, reliability investments, and incident response improvements.
• Multiply impact through cross‑team technical leadership, embedding reliability early in design, mentoring engineers, and sharing deep technical knowledge through documentation and technical talks.

Minimum Qualifications

• Extensive experience in software engineering, systems engineering, or infrastructure engineering.
• Strong background in designing, operating, and supporting highly available, fault‑tolerant distributed systems at hyper scale.
• Strong systems programming skills including multi‑threading, concurrency, caching, batching
• Solid understanding of network infrastructure and software‑defined networking (SDN).
• Ability to lead cross‑functional collaboration and influence technical decisions across teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Expert knowledge of API design and interface technologies (JSON, ProtoBuf, REST, RPC, XML, etc)
• In depth knowledge of K8s, OpenStack, system virtualization, build systems and infrastructure as code
• Strong knowledge of observability systems (metrics, logging, tracing) and qualification engineering.
• Broad knowledge of networking solutions across OSI layers 3 through 7.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to clearly articulate risk, reliability trade‑offs, and operational priorities.
• Proven ability to manage competing priorities, drive initiatives to completion, and deliver results in fast‑paced environments.

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 $184,700 and $324,800, 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.