Senior SRE Software Engineer — Kubernetes Platform Lead

Apple Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 185,000 - 325,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple Inc. is seeking a Senior SRE Software Engineer for the ASE Compute team in San Francisco, CA. You will own the architecture and technical direction for Kubernetes internals, designing controllers and namespace management at global scale, and collaborating with the upstream community.

You will write the hardest parts, mentor others, and build AI-assisted tooling to accelerate triage and automation across services. This role combines systems, software, and operator responsibilities.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 8+ years in a Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Infrastructure focused role.
• Deep experience operating large-scale, multi-tenant Kubernetes environments in production.
• Strong systems background — comfortable troubleshooting across the full stack (network, OS, container runtime, application).
• Expert-level Go, with a track record of shipping and owning controllers or operators that other teams depend on.
• Experience with configuration management at scale (Puppet, Ansible, or equivalent).
• Demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional initiatives to completion
• Strong written and verbal communication skills

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and technical direction for controllers and namespace management infrastructure, from design through production operation at global scale.
• Find and fix reliability problems that only appear past upstream defaults and community guidance, and automate the operational load.
• Set reliability standards for the platform: SLOs, error budgets, alerting philosophy, upgrade and rollout strategy.
• Take on-call, lead incident response for the hardest production issues, and ensure follow-up actions prevent recurrence.
• Represent Apple in the upstream Kubernetes community, driving requirements through design proposals and code in relevant SIGs.
• Grow engineers around you through design review, code review, and direct mentoring.
• Lead cross-team technical efforts through ambiguity, advising partner service teams on platform capabilities and tradeoffs.

Skills

Go

Communication skills

Troubleshooting

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Thanos

Splunk

Puppet

Ansible

Job description

Apple Inc. is seeking a Senior SRE Software Engineer for the ASE Compute team in San Francisco, CA. You will own the architecture and technical direction for Kubernetes internals, designing controllers and namespace management at global scale, and collaborating with the upstream community.

You will write the hardest parts, mentor others, and build AI-assisted tooling to accelerate triage and automation across services. This role combines systems, software, and operator responsibilities.