Engineering Manager, Web Indexing

Apple Inc.; Santa Clara, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 206,000 - 356,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical and dental coverage

Retirement benefits

Discounted products and services

Education expense reimbursement

Bonuses or relocation

Job summary

Apple in Santa Clara, CA is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the indexing infrastructure powering web and image search. You will guide teams across distributed computing, data processing, and storage to build scalable batch and near-real-time indexing systems.

The role requires strong technical depth, cross-functional leadership, and the ability to drive multi-team programs from architecture to delivery, while communicating strategy to senior leadership.

Qualifications

• Requires engineering management experience leading software teams.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems, large-scale data processing, and storage.
• Experience with distributed batch processing approaches (MapReduce-style models).
• Track record leading multi-team technical initiatives and influencing without direct authority.
• Excellent communication skills when briefing senior leadership.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team building large-scale web and image indexing infrastructure.
• Own architecture and execution for offline batch pipelines and near-real-time indexing systems.
• Drive improvements in freshness, throughput, scalability, reliability, and efficiency.
• Enable rapid experimentation for search quality and ML teams introducing new signals.
• Build strong cross-team partnerships and align on architecture and delivery milestones.
• Represent the indexing org in leadership reviews, communicating strategy, progress, and tradeoffs.
• Recruit and develop engineers, fostering ownership and technical excellence.

Skills

Engineering management

Distributed systems

Large-scale data processing

Multi-team initiative leadership

Executive communication

Education

BS in CS or related field

Job description

Santa Clara, California, United States Machine Learning and AI

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the team that builds and scales the indexing infrastructure powering web and image search. The team runs both petabyte-scale offline batch pipelines and near-real-time indexing systems that turn web documents, images, and metadata into production-ready indexes.You’ll lead engineers across distributed computing, data processing, and storage, while partnering with crawling, ranking, ML, retrieval, and infrastructure teams to shape the long-term indexing strategy. This is a cross-functional leadership role requiring strong technical depth, organizational influence, and the ability to drive complex, multi-team initiatives.

Description

You’ll own both technical direction and execution for two core systems: large-scale offline indexing (distributed pipelines processing petabytes of content into production indexes) and fresh/near-real-time indexing (low-latency propagation of new or updated content). Responsibilities span architecture, scalability, reliability, and efficiency across billions of documents and images.Success requires close collaboration across teams to resolve dependencies, make architecture tradeoffs, and drive large programs to completion, while acting as a key liaison to senior leadership on strategy, risks, and resourcing.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team building large-scale web and image indexing infrastructure
• Own architecture and execution for both offline batch pipelines and near-real-time indexing systems
• Drive improvements in freshness, throughput, scalability, reliability, and efficiency
• Enable rapid experimentation for search quality and ML teams introducing new signals
• Build strong cross-team partnerships (crawling, ranking, ML, storage, serving) and align on architecture and delivery milestones
• Represent the indexing org in leadership reviews, communicating strategy, progress, and tradeoffs
• Recruit and develop engineers, fostering a culture of ownership and technical excellence

Minimum Qualifications

• Engineering management experience leading software teams
• Strong grasp of distributed systems, large-scale data processing, and storage
• Experience with distributed batch processing (e.g., MapReduce-style models)
• Track record leading multi-team technical initiatives and influencing without direct authority
• Strong communication skills for technical topics with senior leadership
• BS in CS or related field, or equivalent experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with batch/streaming frameworks (Spark, Beam, Flink, Kafka, etc.)
• Experience with distributed storage systems (Bigtable, HBase, Cassandra)
• Background in search, information retrieval, or large-scale content processing
• Experience with image processing, computer vision, or multimodal systems
• Experience optimizing distributed systems for cost, latency, and throughput
• Experience driving cross-org programs and presenting strategy to executive leadership
• Track record developing senior engineers into technical leadership roles

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
• reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition
• 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.

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant

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.

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Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.