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Sr. Data Engineer - Services Special Projects

Apple· Software and Services
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Cupertino, CA$184.7k - $324.8kFull-timePosted 3d ago

About the role

Senior data engineer focused on building and operating large-scale, real-time data platforms. Responsibilities include designing and implementing batch and streaming ETL/ELT pipelines, Kafka-based ingestion, data modeling for analytics, data quality and governance, and integrating ML/LLM-driven enrichment into data flows, collaborating with ML engineers and platform teams.

Responsibilities

  • Build and implement batch and streaming ETL/ELT pipelines that ingest, process, and model data from diverse sources, including unstructured media and real-time event streams, ensuring high reliability, performance, and scalability.
  • Develop and maintain Kafka-based ingestion and processing pipelines, ensuring reliable data delivery across services and into the data lake.
  • Build robust logical and physical data models with a focus on dimensional modeling, versioning, and storage patterns (e.g., Parquet, ORC) optimized 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 downstream use cases such as analytics, billing, planning, and optimization.
  • Implement standard methodologies for data lineage, metadata management, schema governance, versioning, and security in alignment with Apple's standards for data protection and privacy.
  • Deliver solutions that include logging, anomaly detection, data validation, cleaning, and transformation, with strong emphasis on monitoring, debuggability, and continuous improvement.
  • Work closely with ML engineers, data scientists, platform teams, and leadership to translate requirements into scalable, reliable data solutions.
  • Help advance the team's data stack, including tooling, frameworks, and standards for development, testing, deployment, and operations.

Qualifications

  • Masters Degree
  • 10+ 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 leveraging databases including SQL/NoSQL Databases (including Postgres / Cassandra / Redis)
  • Strong experience with distributed data processing frameworks including Apache Spark
  • Strong experience with Parallel processing frameworks: BigTable/Hadoop
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals and proven experience with Scala, Java
  • Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka, Iceberg, and Flink.
  • Experience with workflow orchestration tools including Apache Airflow and Beam
  • Experience with AWS: e.g., S3, EMR, Lambda, Glue, Redshift, BigQuery, Kinesis, or similar services
  • Experience with Analytics frameworks including Trino (Presto, BigQuery, Snowflake)
  • Hands-on experience with big data lake architectures
  • Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS) and CI/CD tooling including Jenkins
  • Experience in Python and PySpark
  • Familiarity with graph databases such as TigerGraph
  • Experience building pipelines that process multimodal data (structured and image) and integrate ML model inference - including LLMs and embedding models - for data enrichment and transformation
  • Hands-on experience deploying, serving, and optimizing LLMs or ML models directly in the production, inference runtimes/compilers (ONNX Runtime, TensorRT/TensorRT-LLM), and serving frameworks (Triton, vLLM, TorchServe or similar)
  • Experience tuning batching, KV-cache, and GPU utilization for low-latency, high-throughput real-time inference in a data pipeline
  • Knowledge of data governance principles, data security best practices, and data privacy regulations
  • Experience with data versioning tools and frameworks (e.g., DVC, Delta Lake)
  • Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset
  • Experience storing/serving embeddings (e.g., pgvector, Milvus, FAISS)

Skills

Required:Masters DegreeETL/ELTDimensional modelingKafkaSparkBeams/Airflow

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 as well as relocation may be possible
  • Employee stock programs (stock purchase plan)
Last updated Oct 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Apple

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