Software Engineer (SRE) - Virtualisation in London

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The Apple Services Engineering (ASE) team builds and provides systems and infrastructure that power Apple’s services (such as iCloud, Apple Music, Apple Intelligence, Maps and more). We are the foundation on which Apple’s software developers build the products that our customers love.

Our services have to scale globally, stay highly available, and “just work.” If you love designing, engineering and running systems and infrastructure that will help millions of customers, then this is the place for you!

Apple Service Engineering (ASE)’s Compute team is seeking a highly motivated software engineer with strong technical and communication skills to join our SRE team on our quest to build and enhance massive clusters hosting Virtual Machines, Containers and associated infrastructure that can scale to meet the demands of Apple’s Services offerings.

You will work with world‑class engineers on core components of Virtualization and Containerization technologies, customize them to fit Apple’s diverse needs, and engage with the upstream community to drive Apple’s requirements. Ultimately, you will help build the platform that delivers our applications at scale to our end users. As a Compute Site Reliability Engineer, you will be part of the team responsible for providing the platform for mission‑critical cloud systems to maintain constant uptime, scale seamlessly, and allow for new applications and services to flourish.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop tooling, frameworks, and automation in Go and Java to improve reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency of compute infrastructure (VMs, containers, orchestration).
• Define and implement SLOs/SLIs for compute services and build the observability pipelines (metrics, logging, tracing) to measure and enforce them.
• Lead incident response for compute infrastructure, driving triage, root‑cause analysis, and post‑mortem corrective actions.
• Develop and maintain infrastructure‑as‑code and CI/CD pipelines, ensuring reproducibility, automated testing, and staged rollouts across the fleet.
• Contribute to compute platform architecture through design reviews, technical design documents, production readiness reviews, capacity planning, and disaster recovery exercises.
• Partner cross‑functionally with engineering, QA, and program management to embed reliability into the development lifecycle, upholding best practices in code review, testing, and documentation.

Minimum Qualifications

• Must be an expert and have in‑depth professional experience with cloud operations, with a focus on “infrastructure‑as‑a‑service” (compute, storage, and network virtualization).
• Strong software development skills in Go and Java, with experience building production services, tools or automation frameworks.
• Experience with software development lifecycle practices including version control, code review, CI/CD, and automated testing.
• Experience operating and engineering large‑scale multi‑tenant Infrastructure as a Managed service.
• Ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Infrastructure as a Service orchestration tools (OpenStack, CloudStack, etc) is a plus.
• Experience with Linux system virtualization (Libvirt, QEMU, KVM, etc), along with the APIs.
• Ability to implement and coordinate telemetry using monitoring and observability tools such as Splunk, Grafana, and Prometheus.
• Experience building internal platforms or developer tooling and familiarity with distributed systems concepts.

At Apple, we’re not all the same. And that’s our greatest strength. We draw on the differences in who we are, what we’ve experienced and how we think. Because to create products that serve everyone, we believe in including everyone. Therefore, we are committed to treating all applicants fairly and equally. As a registered Disability Confident employer, we will work with applicants to make any reasonable accommodations. Apple will consider for employment all qualified applicants with criminal backgrounds in a manner consistent with applicable law.

At Apple, we believe accessibility is a fundamental human right. You’ll find that idea reflected in everything here — in our culture, our benefits and our digital tools. By welcoming as many perspectives as possible, we help you build a career where you feel like you belong.