Staff Software Engineer, ASE Storage Infrastructure

Summary

Apple Services Engineering (ASE) designs, builds, and operates the cloud infrastructure, server systems, and platform technologies that power many of Apple's most beloved experiences.

Within ASE, the Storage Platforms organization develops the systems that store, protect, and serve Apple's data at massive scale, with a mission to deliver storage that is durable, secure, highly available, and operated with excellence. Engineers on this team will have the rare opportunity to work on storage device-optimized low-level storage, large-scale distributed systems, and high-performance IO stacks operating at mission-critical levels of availability and durability.

Elastic Disk provides foundational block storage services to Apple's compute platforms. We are building a next-generation block storage system designed from the ground up for low latency, high availability, and strong durability — serving as a critical building block for compute workloads across Apple.

We are looking for a passionate lead engineer/architect with experience in developing large-scale services and infrastructure to take a central role in designing and building our next version. Join our friendly, collaborative, highly-motivated team!

Description

You will shape Elastic Disk's features and architecture as it scales orders of magnitude, setting the multi-year technical direction for replication, durability, metadata, and the data path. In this role, you will:

Own the technical vision for the Replication & Metadata Systems powering Elastic Disk;
Evolve our replication protocol to strengthen availability, correctness, durability to improve the overall reliability of the service as we scale.
Advance end-to-end durability: next-generation repair, replica reconstruction, continuous scrubbing, replication-metadata checksums, and point-in-time backup & snapshot.
Drive performance of the replication and network data path — profiling bottlenecks and evaluating next-gen network stacks to keep replication off the critical latency path.
Raise the engineering bar through best practices of AI toolings and insist on high standards for reviews and testing.
Represent the team in cross-org efforts to shape a unified replication foundation for Apple's storage backends.
Mentor and grow engineers; lead through design reviews, technical writing, and hands-on collaboration with storage engine, control plane, compute platform, and storage reliability partners.

Minimum Qualifications

10+ years of professional software development experience building infrastructure, systems, or distributed services.
5+ years designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed storage or database systems in production.
Deep expertise in at least one systems-level language; strong Rust, C++, or C proficiency preferred.
Strong fundamentals in distributed systems — proven ability to reason about correctness under concurrency and failure; meticulous attention to detail.
Experience owning services through the full lifecycle: design, implementation, rollout, on-call, and incident response, with measurable availability and durability SLOs.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related engineering field, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

MS or PhD in Computer Science or a related field.
Strong storage and database background — having led or been a core contributor to a distributed storage system, database, or storage engine at scale.
Hands-on experience implementing or extending consensus protocols (Raft, Paxos, Multi-Paxos, ZAB, Viewstamped Replication) in production.
Experience building block storage, distributed file systems, distributed databases, or replicated storage engines at scale (e.g., EBS-class systems, Ceph, HDFS, Pangu, GFS-family, Spanner, CockroachDB, FoundationDB).
Deep knowledge of data durability techniques: replication, erasure coding, scrubbers, silent-corruption detection, and automated repair/reconstruction.
Track record of driving cross-org technical initiatives or shared platform abstractions across multiple teams.

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 $205,400 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.

Application Deadline

Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.