Principal Data Platform Lead: Real-Time ML Pipelines

Apple Inc.; Cupertino, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 263,000 - 394,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple Inc. is seeking a Principal Data Engineering Lead for Services Special Project in Cupertino. You will lead design, build and operations of a real-time data platform, coordinating with ML teams, data scientists, and platform teams to deliver scalable pipelines and governance across Apple.

The role emphasizes ETL/ELT, data modeling, and deployment of ML-enabled data pipelines, with a strong focus on reliability, privacy, and performance at scale.

Qualifications

• Masters degree in a data-related field or equivalent experience.
• 12+ years of data engineering with large-scale ETL/ELT pipelines.
• Strong data modeling skills, especially dimensional modeling for analytics.
• Experience with SQL/NoSQL databases (Postgres, Cassandra, Redis).
• Proficiency with Spark and distributed processing frameworks.
• Experience with Kafka, Iceberg, Flink, and Airflow/Beam.
• Way with AWS data services and data lake architectures.
• Experience deploying ML/LLM pipelines and model inference in production.
• Excellent communication and collaboration with senior stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead 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 operations.
• Define data quality checks, SLAs, and observability standards.
• Enrich raw signals with metadata for analytics, billing, and planning.
• Enforce data lineage, schema governance, and data security practices.
• Deliver monitoring, logging, anomaly detection, and data validation.
• Collaborate with ML engineers, data scientists, and platform teams.
• Advance data stack tooling, frameworks, and development standards.
• Coordinate with Apple teams on larger-scale data initiatives.

Skills

ETL/ELT

Data modeling

Scala

Java

Python

Apache Spark

Kafka

Kubernetes

Airflow

Beam

BigQuery

Redshift

PySpark

Postgres

Cassandra

Redis

SQL/NoSQL

Apache Spark SQL

Docker

Kubernetes/EKS

Jenkins

AWS services

S3

EMR

Glue

TensorRT/ONNX Runtime

Triton

PyTorch/TensorFlow

Graph databases

TigerGraph

Education

Masters Degree

Tools

Apache Kafka

Iceberg

Flink

Apache Airflow

Beam

Docker

Kubernetes

Jenkins

AWS (S3, EMR, Glue, Redshift)

BigQuery

Spark

Python

PySpark

Parquet/ORC

Postgres

Cassandra

Redis

Docker

Kubernetes/EKS

Jenkins

Triton/TorchServe

ONNX Runtime

TensorRT

GA4GH Data Governance

Job description

Apple Inc. is seeking a Principal Data Engineering Lead for Services Special Project in Cupertino. You will lead design, build and operations of a real-time data platform, coordinating with ML teams, data scientists, and platform teams to deliver scalable pipelines and governance across Apple.

The role emphasizes ETL/ELT, data modeling, and deployment of ML-enabled data pipelines, with a strong focus on reliability, privacy, and performance at scale.