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Principal Engineer, Apple Cloud Object Storage (ACOS), Storage Infrastructure

Apple· Software and Services
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Seattle, WA$205.4k - $374.3kFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

ACOS is Apple's geo-distributed, exabyte-scale object storage service. This role leads the technical agenda for encoding, placement, and service of data in ACOS, focusing on storage efficiency, integrity, performance, and capacity planning across dense drives and AI/ML workloads.

Responsibilities

  • Set the Technical Agenda. Own the multi-year architecture and roadmap for how ACOS encodes, places, and serves data. Identify and prioritize the problems that matter.
  • Synthesize hardware trends (HAMR, SMR, disaggregation), research and industry practice (wide-stripe coding, disk-adaptive and temperature-adaptive redundancy, tiering), and workload evolution into a strategy that keeps our storage reliability and efficiency ahead of customer requirements.
  • Raise the Technical Bar. Mentor and grow the most senior engineers in the org. Lead design and development for our highest-consequence systems, and set high standards for the design and operations of our services.
  • Drive Alignment. Broker decisions across customers, partners (SRE, hardware, capacity), and stakeholders.

Qualifications

  • 15+ years in software development, with at least 10+ years designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed storage systems.
  • BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field. A PhD in distributed systems or storage is a strong plus.
  • Proven track record of delivering storage systems at ~exabyte scale. Past work should demonstrate depth in erasure coding, replication, data placement, repair and reconstruction, consistency models, and consensus protocols (e.g., Paxos, Raft).
  • Deep, hands-on expertise in the encoding layer specifically: Reed-Solomon and Local Reconstruction Codes, wide-stripe and geo-distributed coding schemes, and the ability to reason quantitatively about durability, availability, repair-bandwidth, and IOPS trade-offs.
  • Familiarity with the architecture of industry-leading storage systems (e.g., Google Colossus, Ceph/RADOS, Azure Blob Storage, Amazon S3, Meta f4/Tectonic, HDFS).
  • Experience with the modern drive landscape and its implications: QLC and dense flash, SMR, HAMR, heterogeneous fleets, declining IOPS per TB, and disaggregated storage and compute.
  • Experience designing storage for high-performance workloads, particularly AI/ML or large-scale analytics. Familiarity with the I/O patterns of training pipelines, data processing engines, and high-transaction databases.
  • Operational credibility: you have carried a pager for a storage system at scale, and your architectural judgment is shaped by having debugged data loss and availability incidents.
  • Exceptional ability to influence without authority, with a history of driving major technical decisions and aligning senior engineering leaders across a large organization.
  • Outstanding communication skills — able to distill trade-offs for an executive audience and to hold a deep technical debate with principal-level engineers.

Skills

Required:Storage encoding and data path designReed-Solomon and Local Reconstruction CodesDurability and availability modelingStorage systems at exabyte scale

Benefits

  • Comprehensive medical and dental coverage
  • retirement benefits
  • range of discounted products and free services
  • reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition
  • discretionary bonuses or commission payments and relocation may be eligible
  • Apple shareholder opportunities through stock programs
  • potential for discretionary employee stock unit awards and Employee Stock Purchase Plan
Last updated Oct 23, 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.

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