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Principal Data Engineering Lead - Services Special Project

Apple· Software and Services
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full-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Lead and drive the design, build, and operations of a real-time, multimodal data platform. Partner across Apple to coordinate data processing systems, ETL/ELT pipelines, data models, and ML-enabled data enrichment for analytics, billing, planning, and optimization.

Responsibilities

  • Build and implement batch and streaming ETL/ELT pipelines ingesting data from diverse sources (including unstructured media and real-time event streams) with high reliability and scalability.
  • Develop and maintain Kafka-based ingestion and processing pipelines ensuring reliable data delivery across services into the data lake.
  • Build robust logical and physical data models with dimensional modeling, versioning, and storage patterns (Parquet, ORC) for ingest, reporting, and operational use cases.
  • Define and enforce data quality checks, SLAs, and observability standards to ensure data is accurate, timely, versioned, and trusted by stakeholders.
  • Integrate and enrich raw signals with metadata and attribution to power analytics, billing, planning, and optimization.
  • Implement data lineage, metadata management, schema governance, versioning, and security per Apple standards for data protection and privacy.
  • Deliver solutions with logging, anomaly detection, data validation, cleaning, and transformation, with emphasis on monitoring and continuous improvement.
  • Collaborate with ML engineers, data scientists, platform teams, and leadership to translate requirements into scalable data solutions.
  • Advance the team's data stack, including tooling, frameworks, and standards for development, testing, deployment, and operations.
  • Align with other Apple teams in larger scale discussions and deliverables across the ecosystem.

Qualifications

  • Masters Degree
  • 12+ years of experience in data engineering, including building and maintaining large-scale ETL/ELT data pipelines
  • Proficiency in data modeling, especially dimensional modeling, and designing schemas optimized for analytics and reporting
  • Experience with SQL/NoSQL databases (Postgres, Cassandra, Redis)
  • Strong experience with Apache Spark
  • Strong experience with Hadoop-based parallel processing (BigTable/Hadoop)
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals with Scala, Java
  • Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka, Iceberg, and Flink
  • Experience with workflow orchestration tools (Airflow, Beam)
  • Experience with AWS services (S3, EMR, Lambda, Glue, Redshift, BigQuery, Kinesis) or similar
  • Experience with analytics frameworks (Trino/Presto/BigQuery/Snowflake)
  • Hands-on experience with big data lake architectures
  • Experience with Docker, Kubernetes/EKS, and CI/CD (Jenkins)
  • Experience in Python and PySpark
  • Familiarity with graph databases (TigerGraph)
  • Experience building pipelines processing multimodal data (structured and image) and integrating ML model inference (including LLMs and embeddings)
  • Hands-on experience deploying/serving/optimizing LLMs or ML models in production (ONNX Runtime, TensorRT, Triton, vLLM, TorchServe)
  • Knowledge of tuning batching, KV-cache, and GPU utilization for low-latency, high-throughput real-time inference
  • Knowledge of data governance, data security, and data privacy regulations
  • Proven experience delivering consumer-oriented solutions across the full development lifecycle
  • Excellent communication and collaboration with VP/C-level stakeholders
  • Experience with data versioning tools/frameworks (DVC, Delta Lake)
  • Experience storing/serving embeddings (pgvector, Milvus, FAISS)

Skills

Required:ETL/ELT pipeline designData modeling (dimensional modeling)Apache SparkApache KafkaFlink / IcebergAirflow / BeamAWS cloud servicesPython / PySparkScala / JavaDocker / Kubernetes (EKS)

Benefits

  • Comprehensive medical and dental coverage
  • Retirement benefits
  • Discounted products and free services
  • Educational expense reimbursement including tuition
  • Discretionary bonuses or commissions and relocation eligibility
  • Apple shareholder opportunities through stock programs
Last updated Aug 7, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Apple

Discover the innovative world of Apple and shop everything iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV, plus explore accessories, entertainment, and expert device support.

Discover the innovative world of Apple and shop everything iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV, plus explore accessories, entertainment, and expert device support.

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