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Consumer Electronics, Software, Services, Retail

Software Engineer - Observability

Seattle, WAOnsiteFull TimePosted 2 months agoVisa sponsorship available

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Required skills

  • control plane
  • time series database
  • provisioning
  • orchestration
  • scaling
  • health
  • self-healing
  • data platform
  • distributed systems
  • ingest

Nice to have

  • DevOps
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • infrastructure as code
  • Terraform
  • GitOps
  • container orchestration

Role summary

Apple Services Engineering (ASE) is seeking a Software Engineer for its Observability team. This role involves designing and building control plane tooling and automation for large-scale time series databases (TSDBs), contributing to the core data platform, and ensuring system reliability and scalability. The ideal candidate blends strong software engineering fundamentals with a deep operational mindset, comfortable owning problems end-to-end from requirement gathering to operability. Experience with distributed systems, automation, and core CS concepts is essential. Preferred qualifications include DevOps skills, Kubernetes, and familiarity with observability solutions.

The Apple Services Engineering (ASE) team is building the next generation of foundational tools that empower software developers at Apple to build products that our customers love. The Observability team within ASE is a fast moving, highly skilled team that is designing and building a suite of platforms and services that help Apple engineers observe and get insights into their systems. If the thought of working with petabytes of data interests you, this is the place to be. Our systems must scale globally, stay highly available, and "just work," while supporting some of the largest services in the world. We are seeking a versatile engineer who thrives wearing multiple hats. In this role you will primarily design and build the control plane tooling and automation that operates our time series database (TSDB) in production at scale, spanning provisioning, orchestration, scaling, health, and self-healing. Just as importantly, you will not be confined to tooling: you will regularly pick up core developer tasks on the data platform itself, contributing to the distributed systems that ingest, store, and query time series data. If you love the intersection of software engineering and large-scale operations, and you want your work to make massive fleets effortless to run, this is the place to be. If you'd love to join this amazing team, we'd love to hear from you!

Description


We are looking for an engineer who blends strong software engineering fundamentals with a deep operational mindset. You will own the control plane that makes our TSDB reliable, scalable, and easy to operate, and you will fluidly move between building operational tooling and shipping product features. You should be comfortable owning problems end to end, from requirement gathering through design, implementation, rollout, and on-call operability.

Minimum Qualifications


BS or MS in CS or equivalent 5+ years of industry experience Deep understanding of core CS concepts including data structures, algorithms, and concurrent programming Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Java, Scala, Go, or Python Experience designing, implementing, and operating highly scalable infrastructure services in production Deep understanding and work experience in distributed systems Hands-on experience building automation and tooling for deployment, orchestration, and operations at scale Strong attention to detail, excellent analytical capabilities, and a bias toward reducing operational toil Passion for developing clear, robust, and maintainable software and systems

Preferred Qualifications


Experience building control plane or fleet management tooling for stateful/data systems in production Strong DevOps skillset: CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform), configuration management, and GitOps workflows Hands-on experience with container orchestration and scheduling (Kubernetes, operators, custom controllers) Familiarity with time series database internals and the operational challenges of running them at scale Experience with Observability solutions using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana Experience with columnar storage systems and/or building query engines is a plus Experience building high performant systems in Rust is a plus Comfortable wearing multiple hats, moving between operational tooling and core product/feature development Great communication skills

Sample Apple interview questions

  • 1

    Design a typeahead box for a search engine

    system designmedium
  • 2

    Design a rate limiter

    system designmedium
  • 3

    Architect a key-value store for distributed systems.

    system designmedium
  • 4

    Design a system to schedule jobs in a distributed environment

    system designmedium
  • 5

    What is an API and how does it work?

    technicalmedium

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