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

Apple; Montreal (administrative region); On-site; CAD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple in Montreal is seeking a Senior Software Engineering Manager to lead a team responsible for resilient, distributed systems end to end. You will set technical direction, drive architecture reviews, and ensure delivery across multiple workstreams with a strong emphasis on operational excellence and on-call discipline.

You will partner with Product to align roadmaps, mentor engineers, and maintain a high bar for quality, security, and performance across services used at scale.

Qualifications

• Experience leading software engineering teams that build and operate mission-critical distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of engineers and technical leads, developing emerging managers, and fostering a culture of craft, ownership, and continuous improvement.

Skills

Distributed systems

Leadership

Coaching

Java/Kotlin

Spring

AWS

CI/CD

Docker

Kubernetes

Security

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Datadog

CloudFormation

Job description

Summary

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.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of engineers and technical leads, developing emerging managers, and fostering a culture of craft, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Recruit and hire to a high technical bar, shaping the interview and onboarding practices that sustain it.
• Partner closely with Product to co-own the roadmap, influence product direction, and maintain a shared planning cadence with joint accountability for outcomes.
• Define engineering strategy and roadmaps across multiple concurrent workstreams, aligning with organizational objectives and senior leadership priorities, while establishing clear intake, prioritization, and execution processes for your team.
• Own the full lifecycle of your team's services: architecture, implementation, testing, delivery, operation, monitoring, and on-call, driving resilience, scalability, and performance while making deliberate trade-offs across technical debt and delivery commitments.
• Set engineering best practices spanning code review, testing, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, and documentation, ensuring every solution meets Apple's security, privacy, accessibility, and operational standards.

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.

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. Apple provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Apple is a drug-free workplace.

At Apple, we believe accessibility is a fundamental human right. You’ll find that idea reflected in everything here — in our culture, our benefits and our digital tools. By welcoming as many perspectives as possible, we help you build a career where you feel like you belong.

Learn about accessibility in Apple’s workplace

Role Number: 200677795-2550