Kafka Site Reliability Engineer

Confirmed live in the last 24 hours

Apple

Sunnyvale

On-site

Posted April 1, 2026

Job Description

Summary

The Apple Service Engineering – Data Streaming SRE team is looking for Site Reliability Engineers with experience developing processes, tools, and automation for managing distributed systems in production environments. Our SRE team combines software engineering, systems engineering, and Devops practices to build and run large-scale, massively distributed, fault-tolerant systems. Our software ensures that Apple's services are reliable, scalable, and secure, and we leverage both open-source and homegrown technologies to provide managed data infrastructure services. You will help build next-generation Kafka infrastructure and platform services, collaborating cross-functionally with various ASE teams—from store and commerce to search and recommendations. You'll create platforms that can rapidly scale to serve data with very low latencies. You should be someone who isn't afraid to question assumptions, thrives as a collaborative partner under tight deadlines, and tackles complex problems with elegant technical solutions.

Description

The Data Service SRE team develops applications and tooling that are safe, reliable, scalable, and fast. This work requires an innovative spirit and an extraordinary degree of care and difficulty in engineering. Team members contribute to all major components of Kafka deployment infrastructure, including maintenance automation, control plane enhancements, monitoring and alerting tooling/dashboards, advanced deployment architecture, focused on safety, stability, performance, and scaling. Success in this role requires expertise in several of the following: * Understanding of core SRE concepts - Monitoring, Alerting, Incident management * Deep and wide performance engineering (design concepts, profile-guided optimization) * Service lifecycle mangement across bare metal, and virtualized (EC2), kubernetes platforms * Prepare alert handling procedures, run-books, and collaborate with other SRE team members. * Excellent communication and a high degree of customer focus when engaging with internal platform customers * As a distributed team, ability to work optimally with colleagues based in other locations is essential * Prior experience with development or maintenance of Kafka infrastructure or similar data service is highly recommended Come join us at Apple Services Engineering and help us deliver services and applications that are fluid and responsive. You will collaborate with engineers from across Apple to define the metrics, set targets, uncover optimization opportunities, and ship a service that will delight our customers. This role is for engineers who enjoy deep technical engineering that spans large cross-organizational projects. Your openness to learning and implementing new technologies will contribute to the continuous evolution of our organization. Good ideas are valued and rewarded.

Minimum Qualifications

Support of internet-facing production services and distributed systems via deployments, On Call and Incident Management. Experience running large scale infrastructure with a heavy reliance on automation tooling Excellent troubleshooting and performance deep dive analysis Real operational experience managing services at scale on Kubernetes Proficient in one or more of the following programming languages: Java, Go (golang), Python Operational experience deploying in and running on Datacenter and Cloud architectures (networking topologies, host placement strategies, and failure modes); design of multi-datacenter systems; failure domains; and wide-area networking. Self motivated, inquisitive with an aptitude to learn new technologies quickly and effectively.

Preferred Qualifications

Demonstrated expertise developing and troubleshooting distributed systems and database storage engines. Experience developing critical internet services and/or platform infrastructure. Optional experience managing messaging services like Kafka or other Data services Experience with AWS, GCP and IaC such as Terraform