About

I’m a Senior Engineering Manager at Apple, where I lead a data platform and infrastructure team. I’ve spent 15+ years building large-scale data platforms and distributed systems, and the last 7 of them leading multi-site engineering teams.

My team builds the content metadata platform, live-event data pipelines, and real-time analytics infrastructure behind Apple TV+ and Apple Sports, including the data platform for Formula 1, Major League Soccer, and Friday Night Baseball. I care about measured engineering culture, cost-conscious infrastructure, and growing engineers: so far six people on my teams have been promoted, two of them to staff level.

Full details are on my resume (PDF).

Career at a Glance

• Apple, Senior Engineering Manager, Data Platform & Infrastructure (2021 – Present)
• Apple, Engineering Manager, Content Analytics & Media Data Platform (2019 – 2021)
• Apple, Software Engineer, Media Products Data Platform (2016 – 2019)
• Turn Inc., Architect, Scalable Data Platform (2011 – 2016)
• Teradata, Software Engineer, Advanced Development (2009 – 2011)
• Arizona State University, Ph.D. in Computer Science (2004 – 2009)

What I Work On

• Data platforms and lakehouse architecture: Spark, Flink, Kafka, Iceberg
• Distributed storage and query optimization: Cassandra, HBase, columnar MPP engines
• Real-time streaming and live-event data
• Applying LLMs to production data problems
• Engineering leadership: multi-site teams, operating rhythm, talent growth

This Blog

Thinking@Scale is where I write about distributed systems, data engineering, and things I’m reading. Reach me at yan.qi.asu@gmail.com or on LinkedIn.