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

ACOS is Apples geo-distributed exabyte-scale object storage service. It serves billions of requests per day for iCloud Apple Music Apple TV Apple Maps and Apples internal data and analytics platforms. It provides 11-nines of durability and 4-nines of ACOS Storage Infrastructure team owns how data is encoded placed verified repaired and reclaimed inside a storage cluster. This includes erasure and replicated encoding schemes data placement and rebalancing optimization compaction scrubbing and repair durability modeling performance tiering and the supply chain that keeps available capacity in front of customer practice this team determines what storage costs how it survives in the face of software and hardware failures and how fast it is served.

This is a role for an engineer who has designed shipped and operated the data path of a storage system at exabyte next big challenge here is to support the industrys transition to much denser drives. This means capacity per drive is growing far faster than IOPS per drive and maintenance operations sealing compaction scrubbing repair rebalancing cross-region replication consumes that increasingly scarce IOPS budget. This is made harder by the growing demand for high-performance storage tiers by Data and AI workloadsnnYou will own the technical agenda for solving that across four areas:nn* Storage Efficiency. Drive cost per usable byte down further: reduce replication factor without conceding the durability bar reclaim storage overheads for compaction and other processes and make placement maximize both space and IOPS utilization. Land support for denser and heterogeneous drive generations (CMR HAMR SMR) without letting IOPS-per-TB become the binding constraint on the fleet.n* Storage Integrity. Guarantee 11-nines of durability in production in the face of software and hardware failures. Own detection and repair end to end: balance detection latency against the IOPS cost of scrubbers and ensure correctness of the encode/decode/repair/rebalance paths.n* Storage Performance. Deliver differentiated performance tiers. That means improving tail latency and IOPS for the standard performance tier while also introducing high-performance SSD-backed tiers for data and AI workloads.n* Capacity Planning and Management. Make supply closely track customer demand. Own demand forecasting drive-generation transitions capacity on-boarding and decommissioning quota and rate-limit commitments and the release value when the system is influence will extend well beyond ACOS. You will be the person Apples storage organization its hardware engineering partners and its executives rely on for judgment on encoding durability and fleet efficiency.

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 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 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 Alignment. Broker decisions across customers partners (SRE hardware capacity) and stakeholders.

15 years in software development with 10 years designing building and operating large-scale distributed storage MS or PhD in Computer Science or a related field. A PhD in distributed systems or storage is a strong track record of delivering storage systems at exabyte scale. Your past work should demonstrate depth in erasure coding replication data placement repair and reconstruction consistency models and consensus protocols (e.g. Paxos Raft).nDeep 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 the resulting durability availability repair-bandwidth and IOPS with the architecture of industry-leading storage systems (e.g. Google Colossus Ceph/RADOS Azure Blob Storage Amazon S3 Meta f4/Tectonic HDFS).nExperience with the modern drive landscape and its implications: QLC and dense flash SMR HAMR heterogeneous fleets declining IOPS per TB and disaggregated storage and 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 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 ability to influence without authority with a history of driving major technical decisions and aligning senior engineering leaders across a large communication skills able to distill trade-offs for an executive audience and to hold a deep technical debate with principal-level engineers.

Experience building out a credible funded multi-year path to a materially lower cost per usable -depth understanding of maintenance overhead per usable byte trending down as drive density goes up support denser with durability guarantees measured and guaranteed in of performance tiers in production that support AI/ML and data of capacity that tracks demand within a tight band.