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Sr Engineering Manager - Services Special Projects

Apple· Software and Services
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Cupertino, CA$237.6k - $401.7kfull-timePosted 1w ago

About the role

Senior engineering leader to build and lead a brand-new distributed systems service at massive scale, partnering with Search, Client, AI and Data Engineering teams to define architecture, roadmap, and execution. Responsible for architecture, delivery, and operation of highly distributed, low-latency, fault-tolerant microservices, with ML workloads in production.

Responsibilities

  • Hire, lead, mentor, and grow a team of senior distributed systems engineers; scale the team and its processes as the project expands.
  • Own the architecture, design, and delivery of highly distributed systems and microservices built for scalability, high availability, fault tolerance, and low latency.
  • Lead the operationalization of ML workloads in production, including model serving, inference performance, capacity planning, rollout strategies, and monitoring of model behavior in the transaction path.
  • Partner with SRE to set and uphold operational excellence: SLOs/SLIs, comprehensive monitoring and alerting, on-call health, incident response, and blameless postmortems.
  • Drive data modeling and storage strategy across transactional databases, NoSQL stores, caching layers, and event streaming systems, ensuring correctness, consistency, and durability.
  • Work with Data Engineering to design reliable data pipelines and feedback loops between online services and offline analytics/ML training systems.
  • Collaborate with client and iOS teams to define performant, well-versioned service APIs and contracts that deliver great customer experiences.
  • Establish engineering best practices across design reviews, code quality, testing, CI/CD, security, and privacy.
  • Communicate clearly with senior leadership and cross-functional stakeholders on strategy, priorities, trade-offs, risks, and progress.
  • Foster an inclusive, collaborative team culture built on ownership, learning, and technical excellence.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
  • 15+ years of professional software development experience, including building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
  • 8+ years of people management experience leading teams of senior backend or distributed systems engineers, including hiring and growing teams.
  • Proven track record of taking a new service from concept to production at scale and owning its long-term operation.
  • Deep expertise in architecting multi-tiered distributed systems and microservices: API design, authentication and authorization, concurrency, scaling for high availability, fault tolerance, and reliability.
  • Strong background in the Java/JVM ecosystem (e.g., Spring Boot, async/reactive frameworks such as Netty or Project Reactor) and RPC frameworks such as gRPC.
  • Deep understanding of transactional consistency models, ACID semantics, and the trade-offs between relational and NoSQL database technologies.
  • Experience with event streaming and queueing systems (e.g., Kafka), stream processing, and caching technologies (e.g., Redis) in production services.
  • Experience running services on AWS or GCP with cloud-native tooling (Docker, Kubernetes) and mature CI/CD pipelines.
  • Strong operational mindset: experience defining SLOs, building observability (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting), and leading incident response for customer-facing services.
  • Experience deploying and operating ML models or ML-powered services in production environments.
  • Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence and align senior cross-functional partners.

Skills

Required:Distributed systems architectureJava/JVM ecosystemML in production

Benefits

  • Comprehensive medical and dental coverage
  • retirement benefits
  • range of discounted products and free services
  • reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition
  • discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation eligibility
  • Apple shareholder opportunities through stock programs
Last updated Oct 16, 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.

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