Systems Software Engineer

Envision your potential here at Apple, where fresh concepts swiftly transform into extraordinary products. Bring your passion and dedication to your role, and there's no limit to what we can achieve together. We're seeking a diligent and enthusiastic individual to join our exceptional team, and if that's you, we'd love to hear from you! The Apple Service Engineering (ASE) team is responsible for the systems and infrastructure that drive Apple's services, including iCloud, iTunes, Siri, and Maps. Apple's unique integration of hardware, software, and services means you'll collaborate with top-tier engineers from various disciplines to design and deliver products our customers adore. Our services must scale globally, remain highly available, and "just work." If you're passionate about designing, engineering, and managing systems that will benefit millions of customers, then you're in the right place! The ASE Compute team is seeking a seasoned software engineer to enhance our internal cloud infrastructure offerings. You will be accountable for the central components of an innovative high-performance batch compute platform, integrating the latest cloud hardware technologies with Apple's proprietary hardware and software. In this role, you will work with teams across Apple to deliver forward-looking, high-performance virtualized infrastructure, supporting the hardware and software teams that power the next generation of Apple devices. You'll partner with internal application teams to understand their requirements, co-design operating system features and data center infrastructure to meet your needs, and identify emerging technologies to incorporate into our services.

Description

As a Systems Software Engineer, you will develop, debug, and maintain an in-house virtualized infrastructure platform. Your responsibilities will include: Designing, implementing, and optimizing virtualized compute offerings across a range of hardware types Developing, implementing, and debugging robust, scalable, and highly available services that support fleet operations and infrastructure management solutions tailored to Apple's unique workloads Working on reliability, scalability, resilience, security, and performance limits of infrastructure services, while maintaining curiosity about system operation and failure Collaborating with Software and Hardware teams to tackle and resolve complex issues across virtualization, and networking layers, ensuring robust performance, stability, and security Developing benchmarks representative of real workloads, analyzing and improving scale, troubleshooting performance efficiency and resilience issues, and fine-tuning performance of low-latency, high-throughput virtualized workloads Conducting root cause analysis for on-server system failures and implementing preventive measures Collaborating with cross-functional teams across Apple to understand, integrate, and optimize critical workloads into our platform Participating in software release qualifications and large-scale software and hardware upgrades to production clusters Participating in a business-hours rotation for platform issue responses and same-day resolution

Minimum Qualifications

• Demonstrated knowledge and experience in distributed systems and operating systems, applied to build stable, performant, and secure execution environments
• Strong Linux / XNU development background, including kernel-level development
• Familiarity with all aspects of software development, from architecture to deployment and maintenance
• Ability to tackle and resolve complex issues across accelerator, virtualization, and networking layers, ensuring robust performance, stability, and security

Preferred Qualifications

• Fluency in Go (Golang), Python, C++ or similar languages in a systems context
• Quick learner and contributor to new code bases
• Customer-focused thinking and strong problem-solving skills with attention to detail
• Enthusiasm about upholding Apple’s standards in product quality, design, and user experience
• Prior experience working with diverse hardware, operating systems, container runtimes (lxc, docker, containerd), and virtualization stacks (Qemu, KVM, Libvirt on x86, ARM)
• Deep understanding and prior experience with node management agents (e.g., kubelet) and node orchestration solutions for managing large-scale infrastructures
• Strong proficiency in Linux/Unix internals, administration, and troubleshooting
• Strong knowledge of networking protocols and security best practices
Experience with measuring, analyzing, and optimizing performance in both host and guest environments

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