The Principal Data Architect and Manager will lead the development of a large-scale data platform that supports personalized experiences across Apple platforms. This role combines technical authority with people leadership, focusing on defining the architecture for a real-time, petabyte-scale data backbone. The successful candidate will oversee a team of data engineers, ensuring high data quality and privacy standards. This hands-on position requires a blend of architectural design and team management to drive the roadmap from conception to production.

• MS Degree in Computer Science or related degree and 12+ years of experience in Data Architecture, Data Engineering, or Platform Engineering.
• At least 5 years of experience operating in a Principal, Staff, or Lead Manager capacity.
• Proven experience leading and managing engineers including hiring, performance management, and technical mentorship.
• Track record of shipping petabyte-scale, low-latency data platforms in production.
• Deep cloud expertise with cloud object storage and architectural nuances for massive data lakes.
• Experience architecting systems for entity resolution or knowledge-graph construction at scale.
• Experience designing pipelines that process multimodal data and integrate ML model inference.
• Familiarity with LLM/model-serving infrastructure trade-offs.
• Deep knowledge of Apache Kafka or comparable brokers and complex stream processing.
• Exceptional ability to design logical and physical data models for large-scale data.
• Experience defining SLAs, quality metrics, and observability standards for data platforms.
• Command of at least one modern data-pipeline language and strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Proven experience wiring together event notifications, queuing, orchestration, and compute services.
• Experience with vector search technologies and storing/serving embeddings.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience deploying, serving, and optimizing LLMs or ML models in production.
• Experience with data governance tools and familiarity with Infrastructure as Code.
• Working knowledge of data privacy regulations and best practices.

• Define and own the end-to-end architecture of a real-time, petabyte-scale data backbone.
• Build, grow, and lead a team of data engineers to implement the architecture.
• Set the technical vision and shape architectural decisions.
• Drive the roadmap from conception through to production.
• Manage, mentor, and grow engineers executing against the architectural vision.
• Ensure high standards for data quality, freshness, and privacy.
• Design systems that handle petabytes of unstructured media data.
• Align engineers, partner teams, and senior leadership around a shared technical direction.

• Employees at Apple are often offered comprehensive benefits that support physical and mental well-being—flexible medical plans, confidential counseling, onsite wellness centers at major campuses, and resources for fitness and daily life. Families typically receive fertility support, paid parental leave with gradual return, caregiving leave, and dependent-care guidance, while financial perks commonly include stock grants (with purchase discounts), 401(k) matching, and income-protection coverage. Employees also see robust time off, Apple University learning and tuition reimbursement, donation matching and paid volunteer hours, and deep product and partner discounts.