Hardware Systems Engineer - Data Center HWE

Apple • Austin, TX

1d

About The Position

At Apple, new ideas have a way of becoming products, services, and customer
experiences very quickly. Every single day, people do amazing things at Apple.
Do you want to impact billions of users by developing extraordinary products
with a prime focus on accuracy, understandability and performance of the
product? You will become part of a hardware development team that furthers
engineering perfection, creativity and innovation. Dynamic, inspiring people and
innovative technologies are the norm here. Bring passion and dedication to your
job and there's no telling what you could accomplish.

DESCRIPTION

We are seeking an experienced Server Hardware Engineer with deep expertise in
CPU architectures, compute performance analysis, and cloud-scale hardware
optimization. In this role, you will evaluate next-generation server platforms,
assess workload requirements, and guide strategic decisions on processor
selection across x86, ARM, and accelerator-enabled systems. You will partner
closely with SRE, platform engineering, and capacity planning teams to ensure
our Compute cloud infrastructure runs on the most efficient and cost-effective
compute platforms.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical field.
• 5+ years of experience in server hardware engineering, CPU architecture evaluation, or performance engineering.
• Strong understanding of microarchitecture concepts: Pipelines, branch prediction, out-of-order execution Cache hierarchies (L1/L2/L3), prefetching, NUMA SMT/hyperthreading, core utilization, turbo boost behaviors Experience evaluating and comparing Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC, and ARM.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, cloud workloads, virtualization (KVM), and container infrastructure.
• Proficiency in benchmarking tools (SPEC, fio, sysbench, perf, pmu-tools) and workload profiling.
• Familiarity with telemetry and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, eBPF, etc.).

Nice To Haves

• Experience with large-scale cloud providers, hyperscalers, or high-performance computing (HPC) environments.
• Expertise in power/performance tuning, BIOS optimization, and firmware-level configuration.
• Knowledge of CPUs, SmartNICs, GPUs, and offload/acceleration architectures.
• Experience building internal performance dashboards and analytics tools.
• Demonstrated ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic, and often ambiguous environment.
• Passionate, relentless commitment to quality and user experience.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to debug complex issues across multiple layers of a system.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and manage multiple priorities effectively.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level