Release Engineer, Infrastructure Services

Do you want to help build some of the largest and most consequential enterprise and customer technology systems in the world? Join Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization. IS&T is the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. It’s Apple’s central nervous system. Supporting 2.5 billion active Apple devices, processing billions of secure transactions, and keeping the technology that defines modern life running flawlessly, IS&T makes the impossible feel effortless.” Do you love building solutions to handle global complexity and immense scale? Imagine what you could do here. Infrastructure Services is part of IS&T and the foundation of Apple's global network operations — managing data center 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. The Retail Compute Release Engineering team is looking for a detail-oriented and self-motivated Release Engineer with a passion for automation. The team owns the end-to-end software delivery lifecycle, driving release quality, process improvement, and optimization for the platforms and services that power Apple Retail Stores worldwide. As a release engineer on this team, you will be directly responsible for upholding the retail store experience for more than one million visitors to our 540+ Apple Retail Stores worldwide, as well as store employees.

Description

In this role, you will work within a highly collaborative environment ensuring software releases are tested and validated prior to being released. You will help maintain, develop, and establish a solid and low-friction testing environment, providing a safe space where engineers can iterate and ultimately ship their code with confidence. We are looking for someone who is curious, has a passion for automation, and is eager to learn new things. Your primary responsibilities include managing our code releases, maintaining a lab environment to validate changes across our codebase, and developing tools and automation workflows that contribute to this end. A core goal is to shift testing left, catching issues as early in the development cycle as possible rather than at the release gate. You'll participate in weekly code release reviews, dig into the details of proposed changes, and help surface downstream impact, including implications for vulnerability exposure, patch cadence, and release integrity, before changes are shipped. Knowledge of Linux OS's and software development practices will allow you to understand at a foundational level what a software change will actually affect.

Minimum Qualifications

5+ years of experience in release engineering, configuration management, or software engineering discipline (DevOps, SRE, Release Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, Systems Administrator, or in a closely related role). Proficiency with git and modern SCM practices, including branching strategies, pull requests, and common git workflows. Experience designing, maintaining, or troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins). Scripting and automation experience in one or more of: Python, Ruby, Go, bash. Strong hands-on experience with Linux (RHEL or equivalent) at the command line.

Preferred Qualifications

Hands-on work with configuration management and infrastructure-as-code tooling such as Puppet and Ansible. Background operating software across geographically distributed environments. History of implementing release strategies such like code freezes and canary/pilot rollouts. Track record of producing clear technical documentation. Proven success building or improving hot-fix and emergency patch workflows. Comfort building and managing lab and testing environments. Familiarity with artifact creation, code signing, and software supply chain practices. Curiosity and a bias toward automating repetitive processes rather than tolerating them. Comfort collaborating with multiple development teams. Familiarity with GitOps tooling (Argo CD, Flux) and Kubernetes distributions such as K8s or K3s.