Engineering Manager, SONiC Network Operating System

Summary

Apple is where individual imaginations gather together, committing to the values that lead to great work. Every new product we build, service we create, or Apple Store experience we deliver comes from making each other’s ideas stronger. That happens because each of us believes we can create something wonderful and share it with the world, changing lives for the better. The diversity of our people and their thinking inspires the innovation that runs through everything we do. When we bring everybody in, we can do the best work of our lives. Here, you’ll do more than join something — you’ll add something.

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

About the role

We are looking for a highly technical Engineering Manager to lead a team developing and enhancing networking software based on the SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) Network Operating System.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone with a strong background in networking, systems software, network operating systems, switching ASICs, and large-scale infrastructure. The ideal candidate combines strong engineering leadership and people management skills with the technical depth required to actively participate in architecture discussions, design reviews, complex debugging, and critical technical decisions.

The manager is expected to understand the networking stack from routing and switching protocols through SONiC, SAI, ASIC SDK interfaces, and packet-forwarding behavior of the switching hardware.

This role requires the ability to guide engineers through difficult technical problems, challenge architectural assumptions, identify design gaps, and work directly with network architects, hardware teams, ASIC vendors, validation teams, and operations teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of software engineers responsible for developing and supporting SONiC-based network platforms.
• Provide strong technical leadership across SONiC applications, routing and switching software, Linux networking, SAI, ASIC SDKs, and switching hardware.
• Stay deeply engaged in technical design and implementation decisions rather than operating solely as a project or people manager.
• Participate actively in architecture reviews and detailed software design reviews, challenging assumptions and helping the team make sound engineering tradeoffs.
• Guide engineers through complex debugging across the complete networking stack
• Drive technical strategy and roadmap execution for SONiC platform capabilities, reliability, scalability, observability, and operational maturity.
• Work closely with network ASIC vendors and internal hardware teams to resolve SDK, SAI, forwarding, and hardware-programming issues.
• Ensure the team develops maintainable, testable, and operationally reliable software.
• Establish strong engineering practices around design, coding, code review, automated testing, qualification, release readiness, and production support.
• Develop engineers through technical mentoring, career development, regular feedback, and increasing ownership.
• Hire and build a team of strong systems and networking engineers.
• Create an engineering culture that values technical rigor, simplicity, operational excellence, ownership, and systematic debugging.
• Represent the team in cross-functional technical discussions and clearly communicate architecture, risks, dependencies, and engineering trade-offs to senior technical stakeholders.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a strong foundation in networking and systems software.
• 5+ years of experience leading or managing software engineering teams working on networking, infrastructure, distributed systems, or systems software.
• Strong hands-on technical background in one or more systems programming languages such as C/C++, Go, or Python.
• Strong understanding of computer networking fundamentals, including Layer 2 and Layer 3 forwarding.
• Experience with network operating systems, switching software, routing platforms, or large-scale network infrastructure software.
• Strong understanding of SONiC architecture and its major components.
• Working knowledge of SAI (Switch Abstraction Interface) and how SONiC programs network switching ASICs through SAI.
• Working knowledge of network switching ASIC architecture and packet-forwarding pipelines.
• Demonstrated ability to participate meaningfully in detailed software architecture and design discussions.
• Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals including concurrency, APIs, data structures, testing, observability, source control, and software architecture.
• Ability to balance architecture, technical debt, reliability, execution speed, and business priorities.
• Proven ability to hire, mentor, develop, and retain strong engineers.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent years of experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience developing or contributing to SONiC.
• Previous technical leadership of teams responsible for network operating systems, switch software, routing systems, or network dataplane/control-plane software.
• Experience developing software using SAI APIs.
• Understanding of switching ASIC resource constraints including TCAM, forwarding tables, route tables, ECMP groups, next-hop resources, counters, queues, and buffers.
• Knowledge of BGP, VXLAN/EVPN, data-center networking, leaf-spine architectures, and large-scale network fabrics.
• Experience with network validation, traffic generators, packet analysis, or network automation.
• Experience building highly available and high-scale network infrastructure.
• Experience working directly with ASIC vendors and influencing SDK, SAI, or hardware-related issue resolution.