Senior Software Engineer, Capacity & Efficiency Engineering

Summary

Apple is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help engineering teams understand, model, and optimize infrastructure demand across large-scale cloud services. This role combines deep application and systems expertise with capacity management, performance engineering, and infrastructure efficiency.

You will partner closely with many engineering teams to develop a deep understanding of their applications, architectures, workloads, and growth patterns; identify the signals that drive infrastructure consumption; and translate those signals into measurable resource demand and capacity requirements.

This is a hands-on technical role requiring broad experience across distributed systems, application architecture, observability, cloud infrastructure, and capacity planning. You will help teams make informed infrastructure decisions while ensuring resources are used efficiently without compromising reliability, performance, or scalability.

Description

You will embed with engineering teams responsible for complex, large-scale services and become a technical partner in understanding how their systems consume infrastructure.

The role requires the ability to navigate complex application ecosystems, understand dependencies and architectural characteristics, and connect application and business-level workload signals to underlying compute, memory, storage, network, and platform resource consumption.

You will work with teams to establish meaningful demand models, improve observability into resource utilization, forecast future infrastructure requirements, and identify opportunities to improve efficiency.

You will also help develop common methodologies, tooling, and standards that allow these practices to scale across multiple organizations and services.

Successful candidates will combine strong systems engineering skills with curiosity, analytical thinking, and the ability to build trusted technical relationships across application, infrastructure, operations, finance, and leadership teams.

Responsibilities

A successful candidate will leverage experience across application and infrastructure domains to improve how teams understand, plan, and optimize their infrastructure resources. Responsibilities include:

Partnering closely with other engineering teams to understand complex application architectures, dependencies, workload characteristics, operational requirements, and the underlying infrastructure supporting them
Developing a deep understanding of how services consume infrastructure across compute, storage, data, network, observability, and other platform resources, and translating that understanding into measurable resource requirements that evolve with application architecture, workload, and business needs
Developing scalable engineering solutions, tooling, and automation to provide visibility into resource consumption, validate capacity requirements, identify capacity risks and efficiency opportunities, and establish safeguards that help engineering teams manage their infrastructure effectively
Identifying and driving software, configuration, architectural, and operational improvements that increase overall system efficiency while preserving reliability, performance, and scalability
Establishing repeatable methodologies, engineering practices, and standards for resource demand modeling, capacity management, and infrastructure efficiency across diverse applications and workloads
Collaborating across application engineering, infrastructure, SRE, capacity planning, finance, business partners, and leadership to align resource requirements and technical solutions, and articulate the business impact and tradeoffs of infrastructure decisions and capacity constraints

Minimum Qualifications

5+ years of software engineering experience developing, operating, or architecting large-scale distributed services and infrastructure
Strong software engineering skills and proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Java, Python, or Go, with experience designing and implementing production-quality systems, tooling, and automation
Ability to understand and reason about complex application architectures spanning multiple technologies, services, dependencies, and infrastructure layers
Strong understanding of distributed systems and cloud infrastructure, including compute, storage, networking, data technologies, and containerized environments
Experience using observability and telemetry, including metrics, logs, and performance data, to understand system behavior, resource utilization, and operational characteristics
Ability to translate complex technical problems and system behavior into scalable engineering solutions
Excellent communication skills and demonstrated ability to build effective technical partnerships and drive solutions across engineering organizations
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with infrastructure capacity planning, demand forecasting, and resource management, including connecting application and business demand to infrastructure requirements
Experience developing scalable capacity, forecasting, optimization, or resource intelligence solutions for large-scale infrastructure environments
Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures, distributed data systems, traffic management, and large-scale service platforms
Understanding of FinOps and infrastructure business operations, including cost management, procurement, data center capacity, cloud billing, and financial planning
Experience applying GenAI, LLMs, or other emerging technologies to build intelligent automation, derive insights from complex systems, and improve engineering workflows at scale
Experience with performance and efficiency engineering across application and infrastructure layers, including identifying architectural, configuration, and operational optimization opportunities
Demonstrated ability to define technical standards and methodologies, communicate complex technical concepts, and influence technical direction across engineering and organizational boundaries

Pay & Benefits — Cupertino, California, United States

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 $184,700 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. Learn more about Apple Benefits

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

Application Deadline

Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.

Pay & Benefits — Seattle, Washington, United States

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 $175,000 and $308,500, 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. Learn more about Apple Benefits

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