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Core Distributed Systems Database Engineer

Apple· Software and Services
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Londonfull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Distributed Systems Database Engineer to architect and build an automated, multi-tenant, self-balancing data platform for Apple’s massive-scale distributed storage systems (Apache Cassandra and related coordination systems). Focus on auto-balancing, capacity modeling, multi-tenancy, and cross-team reliability in production.

Responsibilities

  • Auto-Balancing Control Plane: Design and implement automated cluster balancing software that dynamically redistributes data and workloads across the fleet, optimizing for criteria like node count while ensuring safe thresholds for CPU, memory, and network utilization.
  • Streaming Load Optimization: Architect rebalancing mechanisms that safely throttle and schedule heavy data streaming operations (cluster expansions, node migrations, ring balancing) to prevent live production traffic degradation.
  • Multi-Tenant Architecture: Design and implement robust multi-tenancy frameworks within our distributed storage systems, ensuring hard isolation, tenant safety, and zero noisy-neighbor impact.
  • Resource Modeling & Capacity Engineering: Develop algorithmic models to accurately estimate and forecast CPU, memory, IOPS, and network bandwidth requirements per node that tracks evolving data workloads.
  • Quota Management & Rate Limiting: Build and maintain global and local quota management systems, dynamic rate-limiting, and admission control systems to protect cluster health.
  • Failure Domain Isolation: Reason about and implement strict boundary controls across diverse infrastructure, factoring in cross-datacenter connectivity, host placement strategies, and cloud/bare-metal failure domains.
  • Cross-Team Delivery: Partner closely with SRE, platform, and integration teams to ship, operate, and harden this system in production from design through on-call-grade reliability.

Qualifications

  • BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent work experience.
  • 7+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering, systems programming, or distributed systems development.
  • Professional experience developing distributed systems (consensus protocols, replication strategies or consistency models).
  • Experience profiling and modeling node-level resource usage (e.g., CPU, memory, I/O).
  • A bias toward experimentation, you form hypotheses, prototype quickly, measure honestly, and let data settle the hard architectural questions.

Skills

Required:Auto-balancing systems
Nice to have:Database internals (LSM-tree, streaming mechanics)Workload scheduling at scaleQuota & traffic controlKernel & OS-level intuitionJava JVM ramp-upCross-team collaboration
Last updated Oct 9, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Apple

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