Principal Data Engineer - Real-Time Data Platform

Apple Inc.; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 263,000 - 394,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Employee stock plan

Medical and dental coverage

Retirement benefits

Product discounts

Tuition reimbursement

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Apple Inc. in Cupertino seeks a Principal Data Engineering Lead to drive design, build, and operations of a real-time data platform. You will partner across groups to translate complex data requirements into scalable pipelines that power analytics, billing, and optimization.

The role emphasizes batch and streaming ETL/ELT, Kafka-based ingestion, data modeling, lineage, and governance, with collaboration across ML engineers and platform teams to deliver robust data solutions.

Qualifications

• Masters Degree required.
• 12+ years of data engineering experience with large ETL/ELT pipelines.
• Proficiency in dimensional data modeling for analytics and reporting.
• Experience with SQL/NoSQL databases (Postgres, Cassandra, Redis).
• Strong Spark experience and distributed data processing.
• Proven skills in Scala/Java software engineering.
• Hands-on with Kafka, Iceberg, and Flink.
• Experience with Airflow and Beam workflows.
• Proficient with AWS services (S3, EMR, Lambda, Glue, Redshift).
• Experience with Trino/Presto/Snowflake for analytics.
• Hands-on with big data lake architectures and Kubernetes/Docker.
• Experience deploying ML/LLM pipelines in production.

Responsibilities

• Build batch and streaming ETL/ELT pipelines ingesting diverse data sources.
• Develop Kafka-based ingestion and processing pipelines to data lake.
• Create robust data models optimized for analytics and reporting.
• Define data quality checks, SLAs, and observability standards.
• Integrate raw signals with metadata for downstream analytics and billing.
• Enforce data lineage, metadata management, and schema governance.
• Deliver logging, anomaly detection, validation, cleaning, and transformation pipelines.
• Collaborate with ML engineers, data scientists, platform teams and leadership.
• Advance data stack tooling, frameworks, and operational standards.
• Align with other Apple teams on strategic data initiatives.

Skills

Masters Degree

12+ years experience

Dimensional modeling

SQL/NoSQL

Apache Spark

Big Data platforms

Scala/Java

Apache Kafka

Airflow/Beam

AWS services

Trino/Presto/Snowflake

PySpark

Docker/Kubernetes

LLM/ML model deployment

Education

Masters Degree

Tools

Kafka

Spark

Airflow

Beam

Hadoop

Kubernetes

Jenkins

Python

PySpark

Iceberg

TigerGraph

Job description

Apple Inc. in Cupertino seeks a Principal Data Engineering Lead to drive design, build, and operations of a real-time data platform. You will partner across groups to translate complex data requirements into scalable pipelines that power analytics, billing, and optimization.

The role emphasizes batch and streaming ETL/ELT, Kafka-based ingestion, data modeling, lineage, and governance, with collaboration across ML engineers and platform teams to deliver robust data solutions.