Senior Solution Architect, Traffic Infrastructure ASE

Summary

ASE Traffic builds and operates Apple's managed load balancing, service mesh, and gateway offerings for routing and securing traffic across borders, trust zones, and agentic workflows. We're looking for a Solution Architect to be the primary technical partner for engineering teams across Apple who are integrating with our Traffic products.

In this role, you will work directly with customer teams to understand their traffic and networking requirements, translate those requirements into concrete integration plans, and identify and help close feature gaps along the way. You'll need a strong foundation in networking fundamentals, hands-on experience with Kubernetes ingress/egress patterns, and working knowledge of Envoy and service mesh concepts.

Above all, you should enjoy working closely with people, translating ambiguous requirements into clear technical solutions, and driving those solutions to completion.

About the role

As a Solution Architect on ASE Traffic, you will act as the bridge between our platform and the engineering teams who depend on it. You'll meet with customer teams to understand their current traffic architecture, application topology, and networking requirements, then design integration paths onto Apple's managed traffic products.

Responsibilities

• Partnering directly with customer engineering teams to gather and clarify their traffic, load balancing, and service mesh requirements
• Assessing customer Kubernetes deployments and designing appropriate ingress/egress integration patterns
• Advising customers on Envoy configuration and mesh adoption best practices
• Identifying gaps between customer requirements and current Traffic product capabilities, and working with engineering to prioritize and close them
• Producing clear technical solution designs, migration plans, and documentation that customer teams can execute against
• Reviewing customer integration designs for correctness, resiliency, and adherence to traffic best practices
• Serving as an escalation point for customers running into integration issues
• Working cross-functionally with Traffic engineering, SRE, and partner teams to ensure customer solutions are supportable long-term
• Contributing to internal documentation, reference architectures, and self-service guidance to scale solutioning beyond 1:1 engagements

Minimum Qualifications

• Solid networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, TLS/mTLS)
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, especially ingress/egress traffic patterns
• Working knowledge of Envoy, and/or other service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd, or others)
• Strong ability to gather requirements from customers and translate ambiguity into a clear technical plan
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with experience presenting technical solutions to engineers of varying seniority
• Leading production-readiness reviews for onboarding customers, and feeding patterns observed across many engagements into the product roadmap and prioritization
• Familiarity with scripting or coding ability (Python, Go, or Java) to build tooling and read service code

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with load balancing strategies, service discovery, and rate limiting at scale
• Experience with distributed systems design and analyzing systems for performance or reliability issues
• Familiarity with API design for network-related services and inter-process communication (sockets, gRPC, message queues)
• Experience supporting live, customer-facing services in a production environment
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, manage competing priorities, and drive multi-team initiatives to completion
• Ability to foster trusting relationships across a diverse set of internal customer teams
• Experience with traffic solutions over 3rd-party cloud providers is a plus
• Ability to debug and unlock customer traffic issues across the network and proxy layers, such as Envoy config and admin output, access logs, packet captures, TLS handshake failures, DNS and connection-level problems
• Understanding of Kubernetes networking and traffic concepts, ingress controllers, and Gateway API
• Understanding safe traffic migration techniques (canary, blue/green, traffic shifting, and cutover planning)