equipment and systems to deliver compute, storage, and networking services for teams across Apple, including its internal developer community. From individual facilities to a worldwide network, Infrastructure Services ensures the technology underneath everything works without question.
Description
The Apple Backbone Engineering group operates one of the world's most extensive, critical, and high-performance Global Wide Area Networks (WAN). We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and scale our next-generation Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) platforms.
In this role, you will lead the architecture and implementation of distributed WAN controllers, automated configuration generation and intent-push engines, real-time streaming telemetry pipelines, and distributed control planes that govern global traffic routing, path computation, and network resiliency. If you are passionate about distributed systems, routing protocol daemons, network element programmability, and building carrier-grade platforms from the ground up, come join our team.
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Apple Backbone team, you will architect, build, and scale mission-critical software systems that govern Apple's global WAN and core network infrastructure.
Minimum Qualifications
8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems and network software.
Strong programming proficiency in Go (Golang), C, or Python (high-concurrency/systems programming).
Hands-on experience developing secure, high-throughput microservices using gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and REST with TLS/mTLS.
Solid foundation in distributed systems principles: consensus algorithms (e.g., Raft, Paxos), state synchronization, concurrency, and fault tolerance.
Experience with declarative configuration modeling, schema validation, and automated config deployment/push workflows to network devices.
Direct experience designing and building fault-tolerant mechanisms, including self-healing, active remediation, circuit breaking, load shedding, and blast-radius mitigation for network services.
Deep foundation in computer science fundamentals, including distributed systems architecture, concurrency models, graph algorithms, and systems design
Demonstrated ability to model complex failure domains, handle network partitions and split-brain scenarios, and reason rigorously about system behavior under extreme load and degradation
Direct experience developing SDN Controllers, Path Computation Engines (PCE), or WAN Traffic Engineering platforms in hyperscale or carrier networks.
Proven track record with modern observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and robust CI/CD pipelines.
Preferred Qualifications
Strong working knowledge of core routing protocols and architectures (BGP, MPLS, TCP/IP).
Deep Domain knowledge in Software-Define Networking (SDN) control and data planes, overlay networks and Linux Networking constructs such as eBPF, XDP, OVS.
Hands-on experience with routing daemons (Juniper cRPD, FRR, GoBGP, BIRD) and multi-vendor NOS APIs (Junos, Cisco IOS-XR, Arista EOS, SONiC).
Experience with streaming telemetry and programmability tooling (gNxI, OpenConfig/IETF models, BMP, NetFlow).
Familiarity with next-generation optical transport networks, Open Line Systems (OLS), and coherent pluggables (400ZR/800ZR) from vendors like Ciena, Infinera, Cisco/Acacia, Nokia, or ADVA.
Experience with Linux networking internals and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, GitOps).
BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical industry experience.
