Senior Staff Infra Architect - Foundation Model Compute

Apple, Inc.; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 216,000 - 394,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Employee stock programs

Discretionary RSUs

Medical and dental coverage

Tuition reimbursement

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Apple, Inc. in Cupertino, California, seeks a Senior Staff/Principal Engineer to architect, build, and operate large-scale foundation model compute infrastructure powering training, fine-tuning, evaluation and inference.

You will lead distributed scheduling, cluster management, and accelerator utilization, working with cloud and hardware partners to deploy TPU generations and boost developer productivity across teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in designing distributed systems or large-scale infrastructure with technical leadership.
• Hands-on Kubernetes, cloud infra, and production systems experience at scale.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, C++, or similar for infrastructure and distributed systems.
• Experience with accelerator infrastructure and ML training/inference workloads.

Responsibilities

• Lead hands-on coding, debugging, and solving the team’s most challenging architecture problems.
• Design distributed scheduling, quota, and capacity management systems to maximize accelerator utilization.
• Improve fault tolerance, reliability, and recovery for large-scale training and inference workloads.
• Architect and operate Kubernetes-based infrastructure, including provisioning, node lifecycle, and autoscaling.
• Collaborate with cloud and hardware partners to qualify and deploy new TPU hardware generations.
• Design, build, and operate secure sandbox infrastructure for untrusted code and RL workloads.
• Build self-service developer tools, APIs, and observability systems for job submission and debugging.
• Develop scalable services for foundation model fine-tuning and inference.
• Partner with researchers and security teams to translate requirements into robust production infra.
• Mentor engineers and establish engineering and operational best practices.

Skills

Kubernetes

Cloud infrastructure

Python

Go

C++

Distributed systems leadership

Strong communication

Tools

TPU hardware

GPU/Accelerator fleets

JAX

XLA

CI/CD tools

Job description

Apple, Inc. in Cupertino, California, seeks a Senior Staff/Principal Engineer to architect, build, and operate large-scale foundation model compute infrastructure powering training, fine-tuning, evaluation and inference.

You will lead distributed scheduling, cluster management, and accelerator utilization, working with cloud and hardware partners to deploy TPU generations and boost developer productivity across teams.