Apple on cord

Apple

Core Distributed Systems Database Engineer

External position
London, UK
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Posted
3 days ago
Checked
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2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Back End
Experience level: Senior
Core skills considered: APIs, Big Data, Cloud Computing, Kubernetes
Other skills considered: Linux, Machine Learning, System Configuration

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
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Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Apple's Services Engineering organization (ASE) is seeking a deeply technical Distributed Systems Database Engineer to help architect the next generation of our massive-scale data platform. ASE Data Services operates Apache Cassandra and related coordination systems across Apple's datacenters worldwide, forming a foundational storage layer for iCloud and hundreds of millions of global users.

As our fleet grows, we are evolving our platform to support true multi-tenancy, dense resource utilization, and highly predictable performance. We are looking for an engineer to design and build an intelligent, auto-balancing cluster control plane that dynamically optimizes our hardware footprint. You will move comfortably between the abstract math of capacity modelling and the concrete realities of running distributed database at scale.

The ASE Data Services team is building an automated, multi-tenant platform layer designed to extract maximum efficiency out of our global footprint without compromising on reliability. This requires an extraordinary degree of engineering rigor. You will own the architecture for resource quota management, node-level capacity estimation, driving performance efficiencies and dynamic cluster rebalancing algorithms across our fleet.

You will figure out how to model CPU, memory, IOPS, and data-streaming requirements per node, and build the software that automatically redistributes data and workloads to optimize the total node count. Over time, the platform will lean on modern workload-scheduling and orchestration primitives to enforce these boundaries, turning raw hardware into a highly efficient, self-healing, self-balancing multi-tenant utility. This work demands an innovative spirit, deep systems intuition, and the communication skills to partner with platform, SRE, and product teams across Apple.


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.

Minimum 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.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Cluster Orchestration & Balancing: Hands-on experience building auto-balancing systems, scheduling frameworks, or multi-dimensional resource allocation algorithms for large-scale distributed systems.
  • Database Internals & Streaming: Experience with distributed database internals LSM-tree architectures. Deep understanding of streaming mechanics during node join/leave/move operations is a major plus.
  • Workload Scheduling at Scale: Experience running large-scale stateful workloads on modern orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes), with an understanding of container runtime boundaries, resource limits, and scheduling topologies.
  • Quota & Traffic Control: Experience implementing admission control, token/leaky-bucket algorithms, or distributed rate limiting in high-throughput environments while considering fairness.
  • Kernel & OS-Level Intuition: Familiarity with Linux cgroups (v1/v2), eBPF, I/O schedulers, and network topologies that govern resource isolation or the appetite to dig into them on demand.
  • Willingness to ramp on the JVM, since much of our current stack is Java.
  • Experience transitioning large single-tenant legacy systems into modern shared-resource, auto-scaling architectures.
Core Distributed Systems Database Engineer at Apple
Position posted 3 days ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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