Senior Hardware Systems Engineer- Data Center HWE

Senior Hardware Systems Engineer– Data Center HWE

Apple's Data Center Hardware Engineering team builds the custom compute platforms behind Apple's services. We design circuits and boards, own rack integration, and deliver complete hardware systems that extend what user devices can do, host the content people love, and enable the capabilities Apple is bringing to customers now and in the future. Delivering those experiences requires systems that grow more complex with every program.

They span multiple physical racks, high speed networking, tiered data storage, energy storage, and custom compute from different teams and vendors. Every piece must work together as one. System engineering work happens across the organization today, but no single person owns it end to end. As platform scope grows and programs multiply, that gap matters more. The Senior Hardware Systems Engineer closes that gap.

This role owns the system: the requirements that define it, the interfaces between its parts, and the documentation that holds it together from the first architecture conversation to handoff to sustaining operations. If that kind of ownership is what you're built for, we want to talk.

You will own the system as a whole: the requirements that define it, the interfaces that connect it, the documentation that captures it, and the evidence that proves every part of it works. You'll work with our architecture team to turn high level platform goals into a complete, verifiable set of hardware requirements. Then you'll deliver those requirements to the teams responsible for each piece: custom PCBs, rack enclosures, power delivery and energy storage, networking, data storage, mechanical systems, firmware, and software.

You won't build each of those pieces, but you'll know each domain well enough to write requirements they can actually build to, catch problems at boundaries before they become integration surprises, and get every team aligned on what the system needs. Our platforms integrate custom, semi custom, and off the shelf hardware across multiple programs running in parallel. Requirements take shape during the architecture and high level design process, and one of the most important things this role does is pull that work as early as possible.

A requirement discovered during detailed design is expensive, and one discovered during validation testing is far more disruptive. Your job is to lead the requirements process at the system level from the very start: make decisions, document them with enough rigor that a sustaining team can depend on them years from now, and keep the whole picture in focus while everyone else is heads down in their domain.

The right person for this role has done it before, though not necessarily in a datacenter. We'd rather hire someone who has already lived through a fundamental shift in what a system needs to be. Fields like defense, aerospace, automotive, and industrial systems have been solving exactly this class of problem for decades. What we need is someone who can write a requirement that can be tested, own a room full of specialists and drive them to agreement, and see three moves ahead when a change in one sub system creates a problem somewhere else.

This is a role for someone who measures success in decisions that stick and hardware that ships.

• Define and maintain the full set of system-level hardware requirements for Apple's custom infrastructure platforms, covering the full lifecycle from initial architecture through program close
• Write and own the system engineering document set that defines the platform — including system requirements specifications, interface control documents, verification and validation plans, requirements traceability, and trade study records — and specify the interfaces between all sub systems and vendors across electrical, power, thermal, mechanical, optical, and protocol domains
• Own the closure of trade studies for major platform decisions across rack architecture, power delivery, energy storage, networking, and data storage: define the evaluation criteria, coordinate the technical analysis across contributing teams, and maintain the formal record of what was decided and why
• Deliver requirements to sub system technical owners, internal teams, and external suppliers with enough precision that each team can design, validate, or procure their piece of the platform without ambiguity
• Drive alignment across hardware, mechanical, firmware, software, and…