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Observability SRE Manager, Apple Services Engineering

Apple· Software and Services
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Full-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Senior SRE leader responsible for the reliability, scalability, and performance of Apple’s observability platform (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting) and related self-service capabilities. Defines technical direction, builds and mentors a team, drives automation and AI-driven improvements, and partners across engineering, infrastructure, finance, and product to uphold platform reliability at Apple 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 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 to reduce toil
  • Champion automation to eliminate manual processes through tooling, self-service platforms, and APIs
  • 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 and operability
  • Balance technical debt reduction with feature development to maintain platform health
  • Define and execute a clear AI strategy for the SRE organization to reduce toil and improve reliability
  • Drive adoption of AI-assisted tooling into day-to-day SRE workflows
  • Lead, grow, and mentor a team of Site Reliability Engineers; conduct 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development
  • Hire and build out the SRE team; develop engineers to meet career and organizational goals
  • Build and scale a high-performing team through coaching, 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
  • Build strong partnerships across Apple and align on priorities with an Apple-first mindset
  • Represent the SRE perspective in cross-functional planning and translate reliability requirements into architecture decisions
  • Communicate strategy, trade-offs, and progress to senior leadership
  • Drive standardization and best practices across observability and infrastructure landscape
  • Build cross-functional partnerships and negotiate priorities with stakeholders
  • Drive cultural and process transformations within SRE organizations
  • Promote AI-driven modernization of SRE practices
  • Maintain a balance between reliability focus and feature delivery to sustain platform health

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of engineering management experience leading SRE, infrastructure, or observability/monitoring teams
  • Experience hiring and leading engineers, with a focus on growth and mentorship
  • Deep understanding of observability systems and practices: metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, SLOs, error budgets, fault analysis at scale
  • Strong systems background; adept at troubleshooting across the full stack (network, OS, container runtime, application)
  • Experience operating large-scale, multi-tenant distributed systems in production, including Kubernetes environments
  • Proficiency in shell/bash scripting and at least one production language (Python preferred; Go, Java, or Scala 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 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 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)
  • Knowledge of TCP/IP, HTTP, web application security, and multi-tier web architectures
  • Experience running infrastructure as an internal managed service with defined SLAs
  • Familiarity with microservices and Kubernetes at scale
  • Background in capacity planning, performance engineering, or infrastructure architecture
  • Experience building or deploying AI-powered operational tooling (AIOps, intelligent alerting, automated diagnostics)
  • Strong communication skills; ability to tailor multi-mode communications to different audiences
  • Ability to anticipate and balance needs of multiple stakeholders
  • Resilience and adaptability in solving complex problems
  • Commitment to continuous improvement and effective processes

Skills

Required:Observability systemsKubernetesProgrammingAI/ML tooling for SRELeadership

Benefits

  • Apple benefits and accommodations as described in job postings
Last updated Oct 9, 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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