Engineering Program Manager: Speech Understanding / Generation

Apple, Inc.; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple Inc. in Cupertino, CA is seeking a Senior Engineering Program Manager for the Siri Speech team.

You will lead high-impact initiatives spanning speech understanding and generation, coordinating with Siri engineering teams and cross-functional partners to deliver state-of-the-art speech capabilities to users worldwide. The role requires building and maintaining complex software platforms, tools, and processes to ship end-to-end consumer experiences, and driving adoption of core speech

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in software project or program management for consumer products
• Experience with software powered by statistical learning (machine learning and/or deep-learning) and foundation models (LLMs, multimodal, or generative AI)
• Excellent project management skills including project structuring and managing multiple work streams cross functionally
• Proven track record of leading and shipping multiple complex, cross-functional projects simultaneously
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, set priorities, and defend trade-offs
• Strong verbal and written communication and ability to influence across seniority levels
• BS/MS/PhD with focus in CS/CE/EE or equivalent experience

Responsibilities

• Plan: Create and manage project schedules with clear dependencies and critical path.
• Risk management: identify risks, mitigations, and re-plan as needed.
• Communicate: provide clear program status updates to executive teams.
• Coordinate: align engineering and design discussions with project teams.
• Execute: ensure on-time delivery and deployment with checkpoints.
• Continuously Improve: propose and implement new ways to increase value delivery to customers.

Skills

Project management experience

Communication skills

Education

BS/MS/PhD in CS/CE/EE or equivalent

Tools

Agile SDLC

Job description

At Apple, new ideas have a way of becoming extraordinary products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. Do you love taking on challenges that create a positive impact for millions of people?

The Siri Speech team at Apple is building groundbreaking technology and defining the future of speech experiences. We are looking for an experienced Engineering Program Manager to lead high-impact initiatives that touch products and features across the Apple ecosystem—from Dictation and Siri Voices to FaceTime Live Captions, Voicemail Transcription, AirPods Live Translation, and Live Rewind on Apple Watch. If you’re excited about shipping state-of-the‑art speech and AI technology to millions of users daily, come help lead the charge!

We’re looking for a senior engineering program manager with a proven track record of building and maintaining complex software platforms, tools and processes that help deliver new end‑to‑end consumer experiences.

As an Engineering Program Manager on the Siri Speech team, you will drive the delivery and adoption of Apple’s core speech technologies, spanning speech understanding and generation. In this role, you will collaborate closely with Siri engineering teams and cross‑functional partners across Apple to bring state‑of‑the‑art speech capabilities to life. You will serve as a domain expert—synthesizing partner requirements, prioritizing critical needs, and integrating them into the broader Speech roadmap. You will be responsible for shipping high‑impact speech features in Siri, and scaling adoption across internal and external use cases, and championing partner team success across the ecosystem.

Plan: Create and manage project schedules with clear dependencies, critical path and systematic methodology to communicate status. Manage risks and mitigations, and re‑plan as events warrant. Drive alignment across the organization and between teams

Problem solve: Proactively identify issues and solutions, and marshal resources necessary to attack and resolve. Coordinate with teams to identify issues, prioritize tasks and track risks to schedule and product quality, including cross‑functional dependencies

Communicate: Provide clear, timely and objective communication, including regular program status updates and critical issues as needed to executive team

Coordinate: Coordinate discussions and break down complex issues into discussion topics to drive engineering and design alignment with support from project team, maintaining an orientation toward teamwork and collaboration

Execute: Drive on time delivery and deployment, identifying development and feasibility needs, establishing achievements for checkpoints and status updates

Continuously Improve: Reflect on how the team operates, propose and implement new ways to work in order to improve the rate at which the team delivers value to customers.

Minimum Qualifications

7+ years of experience in software project or program management for consumer products
Experience with software powered by statistical learning (machine learning and/or deep‑learning), including practical exposure to foundation models (e.g., LLMs, multimodal, or generative AI technologies)
Excellent project management skills including project structuring and managing multiple work streams cross functionally
Proven track record of leading and shipping multiple complex, cross‑functional projects at the same time.
Ability to navigate ambiguity, identify the most critical/urgent work, set priorities, and defend trade-offs.
Strong verbal and written communication skills, including negotiation, presentation, and influence.
Experience working cross‑functionally with people at all levels of seniority & leadership.
BS/MS/PhD with a focus in CS/CE/EE or equivalent experience

Preferred Qualifications

Experience working with voice assistant technologies.
Direct experience or exposure working with frontier models, advanced model evaluation, pre‑training/fine‑tuning pipelines, or state‑of‑the‑art AI architectures
Familiarity with ML development workflows, including model evaluation, quality metrics, and data pipelines.
Strong analytical thinking, analysis, and problem‑solving skills
Proficiency in Agile, SDLC development processes
Ability to communicate abstract ideas clearly and independently manage complex project objectives