Cloud Network Engineer, Infrastructure Services

Summary

Do you want to help build some of the largest and most consequential enterprise and customer technology systems in the world? Join Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization.
IS&T is the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. It’s Apple’s central nervous system. Supporting 2.5 billion active Apple devices, processing billions of secure transactions, and keeping the technology that defines modern life running flawlessly, IS&T makes the impossible feel effortless.”
Do you love building solutions to handle global complexity and immense scale? Imagine what you could do here.
Infrastructure Services is part of IS&T and the foundation of Apple's global network operations — managing data center equipment and systems to deliver compute, storage, and networking services for teams across Apple, including its internal developer community. From individual facilities to a worldwide network, Infrastructure Services ensures the technology underneath everything works without question.

We're looking for a Principal-level engineer to own and run a critical slice of our hyperscale cloud network as if it were their own business. This is a global network spanning massive scale, deep complexity, and constant evolution and it needs someone who doesn't just design for it, but takes end-to-end accountability for its health, growth, and future.

Description

Every day, our hyperscale Apple Cloud network moves traffic across a footprint of VPCs, subnets, gateways, and transit architectures that span the globe, powering services relied on by millions. At this scale, small decisions compound quickly, and the difference between a good architecture and a great one shows up in resilience during failure, efficiency under load, and how gracefully the system absorbs growth. You'll be the person closest to that reality, thinking not just in terms of uptime and design reviews, but in terms of risk, cost, and long-term strategic tradeoffs, the way a business owner would.
This role sits at the intersection of network engineering, distributed systems, and compute infrastructure. You'll bring deep technical fluency across all three domains, but just as importantly, the judgment and business instincts to know where to invest engineering effort for maximum impact. You'll operate like an owner: someone who sees a problem, doesn't wait to be asked, and drives it to resolution because it's the right thing for the business, not because it's in the job description.
If you get energy from taking ambiguous, high-stakes problems and turning them into clear technical strategy, and if you want the kind of ownership usually reserved for founders, applied at hyperscale, this is the role for you.

Responsibilities

Own the framework for modeling deployment scale and complexity across the cloud network (VPCs, subnets, routes, gateways, peering, transit), forecasting and stress-testing against architectural limits.
Identify emerging complexity and scale risks 12-24+ months ahead of impact, shaping roadmaps to address them before they materialize.
Serve as the org's principal authority on availability and reliability, defining SLO frameworks grounded in real user/service impact.
Lead the most complex, cross-cutting reliability initiatives end-to-end, driving systemic architectural fixes (not one-off patches) from incidents and postmortems.
Establish org-wide standards for availability engineering, blast-radius reduction, and failure-domain isolation.

Serve as the senior technical representative of Cloud Network in major infrastructure-wide initiatives, building trust with senior leaders and engineering peers to align competing priorities.
Articulate complex tradeoffs and long-term technical strategy to executive/cross-functional audiences, shaping company-level decisions where cloud network architecture is critical.
Set architectural standards adopted org-wide, mentor senior/staff engineers, and act as the escalation point for the highest-severity or highest-ambiguity production problems.
Stay current with industry trends in cloud networking and bring relevant innovations back to the team.

Minimum Qualifications

8+ years of experience in network engineering, with substantial experience operating large-scale networks in cloud or hybrid environments
Demonstrated experience owning production availability and driving incident response for business-critical infrastructure
Strong hands-on knowledge of core networking concepts (BGP, DNS, load balancing, VPCs, SDN) and cloud-native networking (Kubernetes CNI, service mesh, overlay networks)
Experience leading cross-functional or cross-team technical projects from design through execution
Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to clearly articulate risk, reliability trade-offs, and operational priorities to both engineering teams and senior leadership

Preferred Qualifications

Experience operating at architect level with a track record of technical leadership beyond your immediate team
Background spanning both network and compute infrastructure domains
Experience building and tracking SLOs/error budgets and driving org-wide reliability programs
History of pitching new technical initiatives and securing organizational investment or buy-in

Pay & Benefits — San Francisco Bay Area, 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.