Senior SDN & WAN Architect — Global Scale Backbone

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

Job summary

Apple Backbone Engineering seeks a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and scale SDN/SDI platforms for the global WAN. You will lead architecture of distributed controllers, telemetry pipelines, and control planes across multi-vendor networks.

You will work with Go, C, Python; implement high-performance microservices; participate in SRE practices and GitOps with Kubernetes.

This role offers competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering in large-scale distributed systems.
• Proficiency in Go, C, or Python.
• Experience with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, REST/TLS.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, fault tolerance, and concurrency.
• Experience with declarative config modeling and automation for multi-vendor devices.

Responsibilities

• Design fault-tolerant SDN controllers and state synchronization for global traffic engineering.
• Architect declarative config generation and push engines for multi-vendor devices.
• Build controllers for routing/forwarding plane interaction across networks.
• Extend controllers to bridge IP and optical transport layers.
• Develop telemetry and observability pipelines using NetFlow, IPFIX, gNMI, and OpenTelemetry.
• Implement secure, low-latency microservices with Go/C/Python and GitOps deployment.

Skills

Go

C

Python

Distributed systems

gRPC

Protocol Buffers

REST

Education

BS/MS/PhD in CS/CE

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Apple Backbone Engineering seeks a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and scale SDN/SDI platforms for the global WAN. You will lead architecture of distributed controllers, telemetry pipelines, and control planes across multi-vendor networks.

You will work with Go, C, Python; implement high-performance microservices; participate in SRE practices and GitOps with Kubernetes.

This role offers competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits.