This role pays more than
88%
of similar roles. Most pay
$182,550–$254,750
— the shaded band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$290k
versus about
$219k
for comparable roles.
Based on 240 similar postings.
Employer
About Apple Inc
Apple Inc. is a multinational technology company known for designing and manufacturing consumer electronics, software, and online services, including the iPhone, Mac, iPad, and App Store. Industry: Consumer Electronics & Software
Apple Inc currently has
2305 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$175,000–$280,000
across 1873 roles with salary data.
Principal Engineer, Apple Cloud Object Storage (ACOS), Storage Infrastructure joins the ACOS Storage Infrastructure team to manage how data is encoded, placed, verified, repaired, and reclaimed within a massive storage cluster. This role focuses on solving critical challenges related to high-density drives, where increasing capacity outpaces available IOPS for maintenance operations like scrubbing, rebalancing, and replication. The engineer will define the technical roadmap for storage efficiency, integrity, performance tiers for AI workloads, and capacity planning. Key responsibilities include designing erasure coding schemes, managing data placement, and ensuring 11-nines of durability against hardware failures. Candidates must possess deep expertise in Reed-Solomon and Local Reconstruction Codes, consensus protocols like Paxos or Raft, and experience with modern drive technologies including HAMR, SMR, and QLC flash to optimize costs and performance for large-scale distributed systems.
What does a Engineer earn in Washington?
Median $171250 from 36 postings across 11 companies.
Own the multi-year architecture and roadmap for how ACOS encodes, places, and serves data.
Develop strategies to reduce storage costs by optimizing replication factors and reclaiming overhead from maintenance processes.
Manage the transition to high-density drives while maintaining durability and performance across heterogeneous hardware fleets.
Ensure 11-nines of durability by designing robust detection and repair paths for software and hardware failures.
Deliver differentiated performance tiers, including high-performance SSD-backed systems for AI and data workloads.
Manage capacity planning, demand forecasting, and the lifecycle of drive decommissioning and onboarding.
Mentor senior engineers and set high standards for the design and operation of critical storage systems.
Influence technical decisions and align stakeholders across hardware engineering, SRE, and executive leadership teams.
What we're looking for
15+ years of experience in software development.
10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed storage systems.
BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field (PhD in distributed systems or storage is preferred).
Proven track record of delivering storage systems at exabyte scale with expertise in erasure coding, replication, data placement, and consensus protocols.
Deep hands-on expertise in the encoding layer including Reed-Solomon, Local Reconstruction Codes, and geo-distributed coding schemes.
Experience with modern drive landscapes (QLC, SMR, HAMR) and designing storage for high-performance AI/ML or analytics workloads.
Demonstrated operational credibility from managing pager duties and debugging data loss incidents for large-scale systems.
Exceptional ability to influence senior leaders and communicate complex technical trade-offs to an executive audience.
Distributed Systems
Storage Systems
Rust
C++
Java
C#
Python
Bash
Perl
UNIX
Linux
Data Structures
Algorithms
Concurrency
Fault Tolerance
High-Performance IO
Software Testing