Software Engineering Manager, Fitness Intelligence Infrastructure - Watch Software

Summary

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The Apple Watch Software team is looking for an exceptionally dedicated software engineering manager to lead a new team focused on the intelligence infrastructure behind Apple's fitness experiences. This team builds the datasets, evaluation pipelines, prompts, and tooling that turn a promising model capability into something we are proud to ship. In addition to building infrastructure, the team partners with the other fitness teams to bring unified intelligence capabilities to features across Apple Watch and iPhone.

This role involves shipping real features alongside partner teams, mentoring engineers, growing the team by hiring, and establishing new team practices in the domain. It requires a passion for iteration as the space continues to evolve. We value communication skills, integrity, and creativity, and aspire to build diverse, balanced and dynamic teams.

Description

In this role your primary responsibility will be to manage and support a small team of deeply technical engineers working at the intersection of applied AI and fitness. Alongside the offline pipelines and evaluation harnesses, your engineers write production Swift that ships in the OS and runs both on device and in server-side environments. The team collaborates closely with the Activity, Workout, and Fitness+ engineering teams, as well as with Siri and platform intelligence teams across Apple, and develops and maintains the tools and harnesses that help engineers across the organization build and evaluate intelligence-backed features.

Responsibilities

Partner with feature-owning teams to define what the intelligence layer must deliver, then deliver it, co-owning outcomes rather than surfaces.
Own the craft of iteration to shipping quality: prompt development, tool and function definitions, scenario construction, and the loop between them.
Establish golden datasets and evaluation pipelines that give the organization a trustworthy answer to whether a capability is good enough to ship.
Drive the infrastructure that lets features scale past their first release, including additional languages and regions, broader feature awareness, and richer interactivity.
Track how the state of the art in applied AI is moving, and make deliberate calls about which new techniques are ready to bring into shipping experiences and which are not.
Hire, grow, and coach engineers, and set the culture and engineering practices for a new team.
Design for user privacy from the first sketch, because fitness and health data deserves nothing less.

Minimum Qualifications

8+ years industry experience.
3+ years experience leading a technical team and collaborating across organizational boundaries, or demonstrated readiness through sustained technical leadership of a team.
Deep technical understanding and hands-on experience with software development and lifecycle management.
Experience shipping user-facing features built on large language models, carried through the iteration required to reach production quality.
Hands-on experience with evaluation methodology, prompt development and tuning, and building the tooling and harnesses that make that work repeatable.
Strong product sense and the ability to balance technical feasibility with user experience.
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.

Preferred Qualifications

A track record of influencing outcomes across organizational boundaries, delivering work that other teams’ features depend on.
Experience building datasets and measurement systems, and using them to make quality tradeoffs defensible.
Experience shipping production Swift, including API design, performance and memory budgets.
Experience spanning both offline evaluation and production inference paths.
Background in health, fitness, or another domain where user trust and data sensitivity shape the design.
Experience building a team and its engineering practices from the ground up.
Ability to work with technology partners at all levels of the stack.

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 $206,200 and $356,400, 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.