# Amit Ahirrao

> Principal Software Engineer at Apple

Location: Palo Alto, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/amitahirrao

Principal Backend Infrastructure Engineer at Apple Maps, focused on building and scaling distributed systems that power real-time search and analytics at global scale.

• Leading the design and development of a Kubernetes-native key-value store platform using Redis, enabling high availability, automated failovers, and sub-10 ms latency under millions of QPS.
• (Re)architected multiple microservices for scale, resilience, and low latency, supporting mission-critical search infrastructure.
• Building a VectorDB platform for embedding-based search and retrieval at scale.
• Driving real-time analytics pipelines using Apache Flink for high-throughput stream processing and offline computation.

## Work Experience
### Principal Software Engineer @ Apple
Jan 2019 – Present | Cupertino, California, United States
Leading Core Services for Apple Maps Search Infrastructure, with a focus on online datastores, distributed caching (Redis / Valkey), vector databases, and real-time data platforms. I design and operate Kubernetes-native, low-latency infrastructure that powers global search systems at Apple scale.

Key Contributions & Impact
1. Distributed Caching & Online Datastore Platforms
    Lead the Core Services effort across Redis / Valkey platforms, VectorDB, and real-time data infrastructure, supporting mission-critical, high-QPS search and serving workloads.
2. Kubernetes Operator for Redis / Valkey
    Architected and implemented a Kubernetes Operator for Redis / Valkey, enabling:
    Automated shard and replica lifecycle management
    Topology-aware placement and failover
     Rolling upgrades, resharding, and recovery workflows
     Declarative configuration and operational automation for large Redis clusters
3. High-Performance, Low-Latency Systems
    (Re)architected backend services to reliably handle millions of QPS with sub-10ms latency, with a strong focus on efficiency, predictability, and operational robustness.
4. Search Data Stack Architecture
    Architected and owned multiple layers of the search data stack, including:
    High-volume ingestion systems for structured and unstructured data
    Apache Flink / Flink SQL pipelines for large-scale, real-time data processing
    Vert.x / Netty-based Java services, optimized for 1–2M QPS with minimal memory and compute overhead

### Senior Principal Software Engineer - kubernetes @ Oracle
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Santa Clara, California
Data plane for kubernetes service

### Senior Principal Software Engineer - object storage @ Oracle
Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Santa Clara, California
Backend Engineer for Oracle Object Storage
Designed and implemented Cross region replication .

### Principal Software Engineer @ Apple
Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | Cupertino, California

### Senior Software Engineer @ Apple
Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | Cupertino, California
Java Backend Engineer for Apple News. 
Rest API, Microservices, Schedulers, Batch Jobs, Splitting the monolith 
Java, Spring Boot, Cassandra, Kafka, Spark

### Software Development Engineer @ Amazon Web Services
Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | Palo Alto, California
•	Worked on Amazon EC2 Service and Silk Browser 
•	Java, Data Analysis, Map Reduce, NoSQL, Web Services

### Member of Technical Staff 3 @ NetApp
Jan 2009 – Jan 2013 | Greater Boston Area
•	Working on the design and development of a Datacenter discovery and analysis application
•	Worked on several facets of the product Schedulers, Queue Managers (JMS), Data Transformation Algorithms, Web interface(JSF & GWT), Ad hoc Reporting (Cognos)

### Intern @ EMC
Jan 2008 – Jan 2008 | Westborough, Massachusetts

### Software Engineer @ SmartStream Technologies
Jan 2006 – Jan 2007 | Mumbai Area, India

### Software Developer @ Axis Bank
Jan 2005 – Jan 2006 | Mumbai Area, India


## Education
### Stanford LEAD Program in Executive Business and Leadership
Stanford University Graduate School of Business

### Master of Science (M.S.) in Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

### Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in Electronics and Telecommunications
Mumbai University


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/amitahirrao

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Source: https://flows.cv/amitahirrao
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/amitahirrao/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12