Site Reliability Engineer, Enterprise Technology Services

Apple Inc.; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 216,200 - 324,800; Full time

Job summary

Apple Inc. in Sunnyvale, California seeks a Service Reliability Engineer to design, build, and operate our Identity Management platform at large scale, partnering with engineering teams to deliver highly available authentication, authorization, and provisioning services.

The role emphasizes defining SLI/SLO/SLAs, incident management, advanced observability, and automation with ML-based anomaly detection and GenAI-assisted alerting, while ensuring security and data replication across data centers.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in Site Reliability Engineering focusing on large-scale distributed platforms and Java.
• BS in computer science or equivalent with 7+ years of experience or MS with 5+ years of experience.
• Strong technical grasp and experience with Open Source technologies for large-scale data processing.
• Experience designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting distributed systems.
• Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language (Python, Java, Go, Bash, Ansible).
• Excellent troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.

Responsibilities

• Drive Platform Reliability & SRE Standards: Lead optimization of a large-scale Identity Management Platform and define SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs.
• Architect & Engineer Resilient Systems: Design and manage distributed systems across cloud and on-premise infrastructure; develop tooling and automation.
• Lead Operational Excellence & Incident Management: Manage incidents, post-mortems, and drive improvements with observability and telemetry.
• Champion Automation & Resilience Engineering: Develop automation frameworks, CI/CD, canary releases, and chaos engineering.
• Ensure Security & Compliance: Maintain security posture and compliance with industry standards and audits.
• Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work with engineering, production support, and QA to ensure service delivery.

Skills

Java

Python

Go

Bash

Ansible

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Master's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

Prometheus

Splunk

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Git

Helm

CRD

Kubernetes

Job description

Site Reliability Engineer, Enterprise Technology Services

Sunnyvale, California, United States Software and Services

At Apple, groundbreaking ideas quickly transform into extraordinary products and services that delight millions worldwide. If you’re passionate about engineering and operating robust, large-scale systems, imagine the impact you could make.The Identity Management Services (IdMS) SRE team is seeking a Service Reliability Engineer (SRE) to design, build tools for, and support our critical platform services. We’re looking for someone with strong software development skills, deep systems expertise, and a solid understanding of SRE principles, ready to ensure operational precision at Apple’s immense scale. Your work will be pivotal in powering services across Apple, partnering with engineering teams to deliver seamless experiences.

Description

This role involves managing one of the largest Identity Management Platform services for a vast customer base across various devices and services. Key responsibilities include overseeing critical services such as device provisioning, authentication, token management, and security. A primary objective is ensuring the high availability and reliability of the system to facilitate critical authentication and authorization transactions, user provisioning, purchases, subscriptions, and account lifecycle management (creation, management, and recovery). This also entails maintaining platform security by blocking and rate-limiting fraud traffic at the perimeter, and ensuring high data consistency and replication across multiple data centers through custom mechanisms. The role covers managing infrastructure, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and auto-failover mechanisms. It also involves monitoring infrastructure and application services, driving incident management for internal and external stakeholders, and defining system and functional observability. Furthermore, this position helps teams overcome system bottlenecks and architectural challenges for efficiency improvements, ensures systems are compliant with industry standards and pass critical audits, and drives automation solutions for large-scale platform service needs. Advanced responsibilities include alert engineering, anomaly detection with Machine Learning tools, and adapting to Generative AI enhancements. Investigating device-related issues by debugging relevant logs is also part of the role, alongside managing the full system lifecycle, including configuration and code deployment in user acceptance test and production environments.

Responsibilities

• Drive Platform Reliability & SRE Standards: Lead the optimization of a large-scale Identity Management Platform, ensuring ultra-high availability, reliability, and performance for critical authentication, authorization, and provisioning services. Define and implement robust Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Objectives (SLOs), and Agreements (SLAs) to guide engineering teams toward ambitious reliability and observability goals.
• Architect & Engineer Resilient Systems: Design, build, and manage robust, distributed systems across cloud and on-premise infrastructure. Develop advanced capacity planning, disaster recovery, auto-failover, and data consistency mechanisms. Innovate by creating reusable tooling, automation frameworks, and advanced reliability platforms covering observability, alerting, chaos testing, auto-scaling, and failover strategies.
• Lead Operational Excellence & Incident Management: Drive comprehensive operational excellence through advanced observability (tracing, logging, metrics, alerting) and next-generation telemetry, leveraging Machine Learning for anomaly detection and exploring GenAI for alert engineering. Lead technical response during major incidents, conducting deep post-mortems, driving systemic improvements, and embedding preventive architectural controls.
• Champion Automation & Resilience Engineering: Develop and implement large-scale automation solutions, internal tooling, and frameworks to enhance reliability, cost-efficiency, and operational visibility. Advance resilience engineering by integrating automation pipelines, CI/CD, canary releases, and chaos engineering principles into core development and deployment workflows. Drive initiatives to eliminate toil and contribute to multi-cloud strategy.
• Ensure Security & Compliance: Maintain the highest security posture, implementing fraud prevention at the perimeter, and ensuring strict adherence to industry compliance standards (e.g., ISO-27001, PCI). Uphold all architectural and operational practices to rigorously meet security standards, compliance requirements, and audit readiness protocols.
• Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner extensively with engineering, production support, and QA teams to ensure seamless service delivery. Promote a strong DevOps culture and provide technical insights through log analysis and system debugging.

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering with a strong focus on building, scaling, and operating large-scale distributed platform services, and Java.
• BS degree in computer science or equivalent field with 7+ years of experience or MS degree in computer science or equivalent field with 5+ years of experience.
• Strong technical grasp and experience working on Open Source technologies designed for large-scale data processing.
• Experience designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting distributed systems.
• Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language (Python, Java, Go, Bash, Ansible, or similar).
• Excellent troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Observability & SRE Principles: Experience with monitoring and logging tools (Prometheus, Splunk, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and a strong understanding of SRE principles, including observability, error budgeting, and service reliability metrics (SLA, SLO, SLI).
• CI/CD & Automation: Proficiency with CI/CD, Release Engineering, DevOps practices, and source control (Git). Experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (Helm, CRD).
• Programming & Data Systems: Strong programming skills in languages like Java, Python, Go, etc. Experience with various databases (Relational, NoSQL, OLAP) and event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Reliability & Operations: Experience with on-call, including incident/problem management (PIR, RCA) and a strong sense of ownership for system reliability.
• Security & Compliance: Understanding of security standards, policies cryptography, and authentication (OAuth, SAML, SSO). Knowledge of Governance and Compliance.
• Innovation & Collaboration: Passion for designing reliable systems, advocating for automation, and a desire to collaborate effectively. Experience leveraging ML/GenAI for operational efficiency is a plus.
• Certification: Cybersecurity certification will be an added advantage.
• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.

Compensation & Benefits

At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $216,200 and $324,800, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.

Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs. Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan. You’ll also receive benefits including: Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation.

Note: Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant

Accessibility

At Apple, we believe accessibility is a fundamental human right. You’ll find that idea reflected in everything here — in our culture, our benefits and our digital tools. By welcoming as many perspectives as possible, we help you build a career where you feel like you belong.

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