Principal Lead Distributed Systems Engineer, Services Special Projects

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 backend services are resilient to failures while maintaining performance for downstream consumers.
• Architect well-modeled service APIs in partnership with other internal teams.
• Serve as the lead technical guide and mentor for a growing engineering team.
• Lead high-level technical discussions across the broader Apple ecosystem.
• Identify, triage, and remediate security vulnerabilities in production services.
• Present complex technical and business concepts to executive leadership.

What we're looking for

• Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Professional software development experience building scalable, distributed systems, with in a Principal or Sr. Staff role.
• Experience building and operating large-scale multi-tiered distributed systems including API design, authentication, authorization, and high availability.
• Strong proficiency in Java and Spring Boot, with working knowledge of Go or C++ (preferred).
• Hands-on experience with JVM performance tuning, profiling, and reactive JVM stacks like Netty or Project Reactor.
• Expertise in transactional consistency models, RPC frameworks (gRPC), event streaming (Kafka), and data storage technologies like Iceberg or Cassandra.
• Experience with cloud-native tooling (Docker, Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, and security vulnerability remediation.
• Experience with machine learning systems, LLM deployment, and cryptography protocols (preferred).