Sr. Software Engineering Manager, Apple Pay - Wallet, Payments & Commerce

Socket.dev; Montreal (administrative region); On-site; CAD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple is seeking an exceptional Senior Software Engineering Manager to lead engineers who architect and operate resilient distributed systems at scale. You will set technical direction across concurrent workstreams and empower engineers to own their solutions, from development through on-call support.

You will coach and mentor engineers, influence architecture reviews, and drive operational excellence in incident management and reliability practices across time zones and teams.

Qualifications

• Substantial experience leading software engineering teams that build and operate mission-critical distributed systems at large scale.
• Strong communication skills, verbal and written, to drive consensus on complex topics across global audiences.
• Proven ability to coach, mentor, and develop engineers, including managing technical leads and emerging managers.
• Hands‑on engineering background with deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals.
• Experience driving on-call culture, incident management, reliability practices, and operating models.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of engineers owning resilient, distributed systems end to end across multiple workstreams.
• Set technical and organizational direction while maintaining autonomy for teams to own decisions.
• Protect and strengthen the engineering culture and operating model, including end-to-end lifecycle ownership.

Skills

Leadership

Communication

Coaching

Hands‑on Engineering

Operational excellence

Ambiguity management

Tools

Java

Kotlin

Spring

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

Imagine what you could do here! At Apple, great ideas have a way of becoming phenomenal products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. The Wallet, Payments & Commerce (WPC) team is building the world's best software for paying and interacting with the world, from Apple Pay, transit, and event tickets to digital keys and identity. We are looking for an exceptional engineering leader to build and grow a team of engineers who architect systems at Apple's scale. This is a role for a leader who is equally credible in an architecture review and in a career conversation, someone who can earn the technical respect of deeply experienced engineers while creating the conditions for them to do the best work of their careers. If you love solving meaningful problems that impact millions of people, growing engineers, and defining the technical direction of critical services, we want to hear from you!

Description

As a Senior Software Engineering Manager, you will lead a team of engineers who own resilient, reliable distributed systems end to end, setting technical and organizational direction across multiple concurrent workstreams, with accountability for outcomes that reach well beyond your immediate team. Our engineers have real autonomy and take full ownership of their solutions, involved in every stage of the development lifecycle including operating, monitoring, and on-call support for what they build. Your job is to protect and strengthen that culture, not sit above it. You'll be close enough to the work to have informed opinions on architecture and trade-offs, and disciplined enough to let your team own the decisions.

Minimum Qualifications

• Substantial experience leading software engineering teams that build and operate mission-critical distributed systems at large scale, with accountability across multiple workstreams or sub-teams.
• Strong communication skills, both verbal and written, with the ability to drive consensus on complex technical topics across diverse, global audiences.
• Proven ability to coach, mentor, and develop engineers, including managing technical leads and emerging managers.
• A hands‑on engineering background with deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals.
• Demonstrated ability to drive operational excellence, including on-call culture, incident management, reliability practices, and engineering operating models spanning intake, prioritization, roadmap planning, and delivery cadence.
• The tenacity to lead complex projects from conception to production and keep a team steady through ambiguity.
• No formal degree is required. What matters most is your mindset, your initiative, and your demonstrated ability to apply advanced skills to real-world problems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands‑on background with Java or Kotlin and Spring, and experience leading teams that build and operate high‑volume REST and/or gRPC services.
• Depth in cloud‑native architecture on AWS, including resilience, failover, containerization, and orchestration (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with robust CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and observability tools (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog).
• A solid understanding of security, privacy, and cryptography (e.g. PKI, certificate management, JWT), and experience with databases at scale.
• Experience leading distributed or globally dispersed teams across time zones.
• Experience in fintech, payments infrastructure, or compliance‑sensitive environments is a strong asset.
• Professional proficiency in both French and English is an asset given the Montreal location, though not a requirement.
• Familiarity with generative AI tools to accelerate software development, and sound judgment about where they do and don't belong.