Database Engineer - Ads

Summary
At Apple, everything begins with the customer experience. Apple Ads extends this philosophy to advertising—helping people discover what they need while empowering advertisers to grow their businesses.

Our technology delivers ads and sponsorships across Apple Services, including the App Store, Apple News, and MLS (Major League Soccer) Season Pass. Every solution we build is rooted in trust, connection, and impact: respecting user privacy, integrating advertising seamlessly into the Apple experience, and delivering value for advertisers of every size—from small app developers to global brands. When advertising is done right, it benefits everyone.

Apple Ads, India is seeking Database Engineers to join the Reliability Engineering Team in Hyderabad, to build, operate, and automate our database platform.

Description
In this role, You'll work primarily with PostgreSQL on AWS, alongside distributed databases, and grow your skills in cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and automation. This is a hands-on role for someone who enjoys scripting away toil, learning cloud-native tooling, and partnering with engineering teams. You'll be mentored by senior engineers while taking increasing ownership of real production systems.

Responsibilities

• Work with senior engineers, Application, and Infrastructure teams to support their initiatives, operational readiness, and engineering standards.
• Support routine database maintenance: upgrades, patching, user management, and backup and recovery — primarily on PostgreSQL and AWS-hosted databases.
• Help troubleshoot and resolve performance issues, developing your skills in SQL/query tuning, indexing, and basic memory/I-O optimization (e.g., shared_buffers, work_mem).
• Write and optimize SQL queries and assist in tuning database workloads for efficiency.
• Assist in schema design, indexing, and partitioning under guidance from senior team members.
• Build automation for recurring and manual database tasks — this is a core part of the role. Identify toil and replace it with scripts and tooling.
• Develop and maintain automation and tooling in Python, such as backup checks, health monitoring, provisioning scripts, and operational runbooks-as-code.
• Deploy and manage databases and changes through CI/CD pipelines; contribute to DevOps practices (infrastructure-as-code, pipeline automation, version-controlled DB changes).
• Provision and operate database infrastructure on AWS, using core cloud components (EC2, RDS/Aurora, S3, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch).
• Support distributed database environments and learn replication concepts, including PostgreSQL logical replication.
• Troubleshoot technical problems, escalating appropriately, and document solutions.
• Participate in rotational on-call support as you ramp up (with senior backup).
  
  

Minimum Qualifications

• 3-8 years of experience in IT / software / database engineering.
• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL (or another relational database with a clear path to Postgres); solid understanding of core database concepts.
• Working knowledge of SQL and fundamentals of query tuning and execution plans (e.g., EXPLAIN, indexing basics, pg_stat_*).
• Experience with at least one major cloud provider, ideally AWS, and its core services (compute, managed databases, storage, networking, security groups, VPC, KMS, IAM).
• Proficiency in Python for scripting and automation.
• Exposure to CI/CD and DevOps tooling (e.g., Git, Jenkins/GitLab CI/GitHub Actions, and infrastructure-as-code such as Terraform or CloudFormation, Helm, ACK).
• A demonstrated bias toward automation — a track record of scripting or automating repetitive work.
• Working knowledge of Linux/Unix fundamentals.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, eagerness to learn, and good communication and collaboration skills.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to distributed databases (e.g., CockroachDB, YugabyteDB, Cassandra, MongoDB, or similar).
• Familiarity with deploying or running databases on Kubernetes / containers.
• Experience with PostgreSQL replication (streaming or logical).
• Familiarity with monitoring/observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry ).
• Exposure to other database technologies (graph, NoSQL, or a data warehouse such as Snowflake).
• Contributions to open source or personal automation/infrastructure projects.
  
  

At Apple, we believe accessibility is a fundamental human right. You'll find that idea reflected in everything here — in our culture, our benefits and our digital tools. By welcoming as many perspectives as possible, we help you build a career where you feel like you belong.

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