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Observability SRE Manager, Apple Services Engineering

Apple· Software and Services
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Seattle, WA$225.6k - $338.4kfull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Senior SRE leader to own and evolve Apple's observability platform (metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting) powering Apple Services Engineering. Defines technical direction, builds and scales a high-performing SRE team, drives automation, AI-enabled modernization, and cross-functional partnerships to ensure reliability and operability at scale.

Responsibilities

  • Own the reliability, availability, and performance of Apple's observability platform (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting) and the self-service capabilities built on top of it
  • Lead staging and production environments for the observability platform with the goal of maximizing availability
  • Ensure the platform accurately monitors the health of every application and piece of infrastructure across the Apple ecosystem
  • Define and drive the strategic roadmap for observability infrastructure in partnership with SRE, engineering, and product stakeholders
  • Establish and refine SRE practices including SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, scale testing, disaster recovery, and change management
  • Guide deep dives into systemic and latent reliability issues spanning the full stack
  • Drive incident response, post-incident reviews, and systemic improvements that reduce operational toil
  • Champion automation to eliminate manual processes through tooling, self-service platforms, and APIs for internal customers
  • Manage on-call rotations and ensure sustainable, well-supported operational coverage
  • Drive standardization of monitoring and troubleshooting methodology across embedded SREs and services
  • Represent the SRE organization in design reviews and operational readiness exercises
  • Partner with software engineering and architecture teams to influence system design for reliability, scalability, and operability
  • Balance technical debt reduction with feature development to maintain platform health
  • Define and execute a clear AI strategy for the SRE organization, identifying high-impact opportunities where AI/ML tooling can reduce toil
  • Drive adoption of AI-assisted tooling into day-to-day SRE workflows
  • Build a culture where engineers actively experiment with AI tools and modern approaches to solve operational problems
  • Lead, grow, and mentor a team of Site Reliability Engineers, conducting regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development discussions
  • Hire and build out the SRE team, with a desire to develop engineers to meet both their career goals and the organization's goals
  • Build and scale a high-performing team through coaching, clear expectations, and psychological safety
  • Foster an inclusive team culture and mentor diverse talent
  • Champion engineering best practices for code quality, system design, and operational excellence across the broader organization
  • Build strong partnerships across Apple, negotiating priorities and aligning on shared goals with an Apple-first mindset
  • Represent the SRE perspective in cross-functional planning, translating reliability requirements into architecture and investment decisions
  • Communicate effectively at the executive level, presenting strategy, trade-offs, and progress to senior leadership
  • Drive standardization and best practices across the observability and infrastructure landscape

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of engineering management experience leading SRE, infrastructure, or observability/monitoring teams
  • Experience hiring and leading engineers, with a desire to build, grow, and mentor a team
  • Deep understanding of observability systems and practices: metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, SLOs, error budgets, and fault analysis at scale
  • Strong systems background, comfortable troubleshooting across the full stack (network, OS, container runtime, application)
  • Experience operating large-scale, multi-tenant distributed systems in production, including Kubernetes environments
  • Practical, solid knowledge of shell/bash scripting and at least one higher-level production language (Python preferred; Go, Java, or Scala also valued)
  • Demonstrated experience applying AI/ML tooling or LLM-based solutions to improve SRE or infrastructure operations
  • Track record of building high-performing teams through coaching, clear expectations, and psychological safety
  • Demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional initiatives to completion and communicate at the executive level
  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience
  • Deep familiarity with the Prometheus ecosystem and cloud-native observability stacks (Thanos, Splunk, OpenTelemetry, or similar)
  • Experience with third-party cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible)
  • Comfortable with open-source configuration management and orchestration tools (Helm, Puppet, Spinnaker)
  • Demonstrable knowledge of TCP/IP, HTTP, web application security, and multi-tier web application architectures
  • Experience running infrastructure as an internal managed service with defined SLAs
  • Familiarity with microservices architecture and container orchestration with Kubernetes at scale
  • Background in capacity planning, performance engineering, or infrastructure architecture
  • Track record of driving cultural and process transformation within SRE organizations
  • Experience building or deploying AI-powered operational tooling (AIOps, intelligent alerting, automated diagnostics)
  • Developing and delivering multi-mode communications tailored to different audiences
  • Anticipating and balancing the needs of multiple stakeholders
  • Making sense of complex, high-quantity information to solve problems effectively
  • Resilience and adaptability in challenging situations
  • Knowledge of efficient processes to drive continuous improvement

Benefits

  • Comprehensive medical and dental coverage
  • Retirement benefits
  • Discounted products and free services
  • Educational expense reimbursement
  • Discretionary bonuses or commission potential
  • Relocation assistance
Last updated Jul 31, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Apple

Discover the innovative world of Apple and shop everything iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV, plus explore accessories, entertainment, and expert device support.

Discover the innovative world of Apple and shop everything iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV, plus explore accessories, entertainment, and expert device support.

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