Senior Engineering Program Manager, Lead - Service Special Projects

Summary

We are looking for a highly seasoned Senior Engineering Program Manager to help get one of our most ambitious multi-year engineering programs off the ground.

This is a hands-on, lead-level role for a seasoned program manager who has experience delivering large-scale and technically deep multi-team efforts from their inception. If you thrive when the problem is broad, the org is scaling up around them, and the technical stakes are high, this may be the role for you!

Description

In this role, you will be the connective tissue across engineering, research, design, and business functions from day one, turning ambitious goals into a coordinated, measurable plans that will drive our team forward.

You will own the end-to-end program management of a large-scale, cross-functional engineering initiative spanning client software, backend services, large-scale data systems, applied machine learning, evaluation, tooling, and platform engineering. You will be accountable for the plan of record — roadmap, milestones, dependencies, risks, and the executive-level narrative — and for the operating cadence that keeps every team aligned on what is expected, by when, and why.

You will need to be technical enough to hold your own in an architectural review and in a candid scoping conversation with a Principal Engineer. You will not write production code, but you will read designs, ask sharp questions, and translate deeply technical discussions into crisp, faithful summaries for leadership. When the program drifts, you will identify it early, name it clearly, and drive the correction with calm authority.

This is a lead role. Alongside your own work-streams, you will shape the program management practice — mentoring other EPMs, standardizing how progress is tracked, and raising the bar for how we plan and communicate.

Responsibilities

Building and owning a credible plan of record — roadmap, milestones, dependencies, critical path — for programs with dozens of engineers and multiple partner teams.
Landing AI/ML capabilities in production — moving a system from research prototype through evaluation, hardening, and launch, with explicit quality bars and rollback criteria.
Identifying risks early, developing mitigation strategies, and driving conflict resolution across senior technical stakeholders.
Navigating ambiguity — creating clarity when scope, requirements, and priorities are still forming.
Tracking many parallel work-streams in real time without losing the thread on any of them.
Influencing and aligning teams without direct authority — including senior engineers, architects, applied researchers, and cross-functional leaders.
Establishing durable operating rhythms — planning cycles, review cadences, escalation paths, postmortems — that scale with the program.
Presenting technical status, trade-offs, and recommendations to executive audiences with precision and honesty.

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelors Degree plus at least 15 years of experience developing program plans and managing complex, cross-functional engineering programs in a technical product environment, with at least 3+ years in a lead or principal-level capacity.
Experience leading AI-first programs end to end — programs where the core product value is delivered by machine-learning or large-language-model systems, and where planning, scoping, and quality bars are inseparable from model behavior and evaluation.
Demonstrated experience running programs that span multiple engineering disciplines — client, services, data, applied ML, platform, and tooling — end to end.
Strong technical depth: able to read engineering design documents, follow architectural discussions across several disciplines, and independently reason about trade-offs, dependencies, and risk.
Working literacy with the modern AI stack — model training and evaluation lifecycles, offline vs. online metrics, data pipelines feeding models, latency/cost trade-offs, and the difference between a research result and a production-ready capability.
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including a track record of writing crisp executive updates and delivering technical narratives to senior leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

MS or other advanced degree.
Project Management Certifications.
Experience with evaluation-driven engineering programs — where the definition of "done" depends on measured quality against explicit metrics.
Fluency with modern engineering tooling — issue trackers, planning systems, dashboards — with a bias toward instrumenting programs so status is derived, not narrated.

Pay & Benefits — Cupertino, California, United States

At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $207,400 and $372,700, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.

Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs. Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan. You’ll also receive benefits including: Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation. Learn more about Apple Benefits

Note: Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

Application Deadline

Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.