Principal Data Engineering Lead - Services Special Project
Core
Lead the design, build, and operations of a massive real-time data platform transforming multimodal data streams into an intelligent, searchable foundation for Apple services.
Role type
Principal Data Engineering Lead (Infrastructure & Strategy)
Builds
Scalable batch and streaming ETL/ELT pipelines, data lake architectures, and real-time inference runtimes for multimodal data.
Domain
Big Data Infrastructure, Real-time Data Processing, ML Ops
Deliverable
production ML models
Required skills
Distributed data processing (Apache Spark), Stream processing (Apache Kafka, Flink), Data modeling (Dimensional, Parquet, ORC), ML Inference optimization (LLMs, ONNX Runtime, TensorRT), Container orchestration (Kubernetes), Cloud platforms (AWS), Workflow orchestration (Airflow, Beam), Big Data Lake architectures, Graph databases (TigerGraph), CI/CD tooling.
Preferred skills
Data versioning (DVC, Delta Lake), Embedding storage/serving (pgvector, Milvus, FAISS).
Responsibilities
Design and implement high-reliability batch/streaming pipelines; Develop Kafka-based ingestion systems; Define data quality checks, SLAs, and observability standards; Integrate raw signals with metadata for downstream analytics and billing; Implement data lineage, metadata management, and security governance; Advance team data stack tooling and standards; Align strategically with other Apple business groups.
Seniority
Principal, hands-on IC with strategic leadership
