Lead Distributed Systems Engineer, Services Special Projects

Apple Inc

Confirmed live 2 days ago High trust

Quick summary

Work type: On-site
Location: Cupertino, CA
Salary: $262,500–$394,000 / yr
Posted: 37 days ago
Freshness: Confirmed live 2 days ago
Nearby: 99+ roles within 25 mi

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $198k

This role $328k

$104k most similar roles pay here $425k

This role pays more than 96% of similar roles. Most pay $174,600–$220,800 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $328k versus about $198k 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 1984 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $175,000–$277,600 across 1590 roles with salary data.

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At a glance

TL;DR · Lead Distributed Systems Engineer, Services Special Projects

Role Posting Log in to save

Lead Distributed Systems Engineer - Services Special Projects joins the Special Services Team to design and build massively scalable, high-availability backend services. This role involves developing high-throughput, low-latency systems for mission-critical workloads including real-time transactions, analytics, and content delivery. The engineer will evolve a multi-tenant platform featuring AI/ML-powered services while mentoring team members and leading technical discussions across the ecosystem. Key technologies include Java, Spring Boot, and optional experience in Go or C++. The role requires expertise in JVM performance tuning, reactive stacks like Netty or Project Reactor, and tools such as Gradle, Kafka, Redis, and Cassandra. Candidates must navigate complex requirements involving gRPC, Protobuf, and Kubernetes while managing transactional consistency models and security protocols to ensure robust service delivery for customer-facing features within a sophisticated distributed systems environment.

Skills

Java Go C++ Spring Boot Netty Project Reactor RxJava Vert.x Micronaut Quarkus JUnit 5 Mockito AssertJ Testcontainers Gradle gRPC CI/CD Jenkins GitHub Actions GitLab CI AWS GCP Docker Kubernetes Kafka Iceberg Cassandra Redis Jackson Protobuf Avro Schema Registry NoSQL

What you'll do

Design and build high-throughput, low-latency backend services that process data at scale.
Develop multi-tenant platforms including AI/ML-powered services and large-scale distributed systems.
Ensure service reliability through robust API design, fault tolerance, and high availability.
Manage the full software development lifecycle from initial concept to production deployment.
Optimize JVM performance and manage complex data storage technologies like Cassandra and Redis.
Implement event streaming and queueing systems using frameworks like Kafka for durable records.
Identify and remediate security vulnerabilities in production services through threat modeling and code review.
Serve as a technical lead and mentor to guide the team in adopting best practices.

What we're looking for

Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
15+ years of professional software development experience building scalable, distributed systems in production.
Experience in a Principal or Sr. Staff Level role.
Proficiency in Java and Spring Boot with knowledge of Go or C++.
Experience with JVM performance tuning, profiling, and asynchronous/reactive stacks like Netty or Project Reactor.
Expertise in distributed systems including ACID transactions, Kafka, gRPC, and cloud-native tools like Docker and Kubernetes.
Experience with data storage (Iceberg, Cassandra), caching (Redis), and serialization tools (Protobuf, Avro).
Proven ability to present technical and business concepts to Executive Leadership.

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