Cloud Database Engineer - Apple Ads

Role Number: 200666675-0157

Summary

At Apple, we focus deeply on our customers’ experience. Apple Ads brings this same approach to advertising, helping people find exactly what they’re looking for and helping advertisers grow their businesses.

Our technology powers ads and sponsorships across Apple Services, including the App Store, Apple News, and MLS Season Pass. Everything we do is designed for trust, connection, and impact: We respect user privacy, integrate advertising thoughtfully into the experience, and deliver value for advertisers of all sizes — from small app developers to big, global brands. Because when advertising is done right, it benefits everyone.

The Database Solutions team within Apple Ads defines and implements database technologies, standards, and optimizations that ensure reliability, performance, and efficiency at scale. The team partners closely with Ads engineering and infrastructure groups to enable product delivery through design, configuration, and automation of a large fleet of cloud databases supporting Apple Ads applications.

We are looking for a Cloud Database Engineer to help build and evolve the next generation of Apple Ads’ cloud database architecture — enabling fast, reliable, and scalable data operations across AWS-based environments supporting both transactional and analytical workloads.

Description

In this role, you will design, provision, and automate database solutions across Aurora Postgres, Aurora MySQL, MongoDB, CockroachDB, and other distributed SQL or NoSQL platforms. You’ll focus on enabling automation, observability, and optimization for the database services that power Apple Ads’ large-scale applications.

The person in this role will:

• Partner with engineering teams to understand data access patterns and recommend purpose-built cloud databases that best meet performance, reliability, and cost goals.
• Build and enhance Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) modules for secure and automated provisioning, configuration, and compliance of database resources.
• Develop Python or Go-based automation for deployment, monitoring, and self-healing operations.
• Optimize and tune production database performance, troubleshoot complex issues, and improve resilience and observability.
• Contribute to cloud migration and modernization initiatives, completing the transition from on-premises to AWS-managed databases.
• Evaluate emerging database technologies (e.g., distributed SQL, NewSQL) and advocate for adoption where appropriate.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for escalations (weekly, during U.S. business hours).

This is not a traditional DBA role. The ideal candidate combines a deep understanding of database internals with a cloud engineering and automation mindset — someone who designs solutions, not just maintains systems.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field; Master’s degree preferred

• 5+ years of experience engineering and operating cloud databases at scale (AWS preferred)

• Strong hands-on experience with Aurora Postgres/MySQL and database migration or modernization from on-prem to cloud

• Proven experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) for database provisioning and policy compliance

• Scripting proficiency in Python (preferred) or Go, with working knowledge of Shell scripting

• Familiarity with NoSQL or distributed SQL databases (MongoDB, CockroachDB, DynamoDB, etc.)

• Solid understanding of database performance tuning, observability, and root cause analysis

• Experience implementing high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) strategies in multi-region environments

• Knowledge of database security and AWS networking fundamentals (IAM, VPC, encryption, private endpoints)

• Excellent collaboration and communication skills — able to partner effectively with software engineers and SREs

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading data modernization or cloud migration projects

• Knowledge of change data capture (CDC) frameworks such as GoldenGate, Debezium or AWS DMS

• Exposure to containerized or serverless database deployments (e.g., RDS on EKS, Aurora Serverless)

• Prior experience in Ad Tech or other high-scale distributed systems environments