Manager, Engineering Program Management — Customer Systems

Socket.dev; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 190,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Job summary

Apple is seeking a Manager of Engineering Program Management for Customer Systems to lead a team delivering complex, multi-year platform initiatives across a global contact center footprint.

You will own the portfolio roadmap, budget, and total cost of ownership, partnering daily with Engineering leaders, Solution Architects, stakeholders, and finance to translate strategy into executable roadmaps that scale globally.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in technical or engineering program management delivering large cross-functional initiatives.
• 5+ years leading program managers across distributed teams.
• Budget forecasting, cost allocation, TCO and ROI experience.
• Hands-on Generative AI tooling and LLMs in program execution.
• Strong ability to engage engineers and architects and influence leadership.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of Engineering Program Managers delivering complex, multi-year platform initiatives across a global contact center footprint.
• Own the portfolio roadmap and delivery, team health, budget and total cost of ownership.
• Partner with Engineering leaders, Solution Architects, business stakeholders, and finance to turn strategy into executable roadmaps.
• Drive adoption of GenAI and agentic tooling to focus effort on judgment and impact.

Skills

Technical program management

People management

Budget ownership

Generative AI experience

Executive communication

Architectural collaboration

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science/Engineering or related field

Job description

Do you want to help build some of the largest and most consequential enterprise and customer technology systems in the world? Join Apple's Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization. IS&T is the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. It's Apple's central nervous system. Supporting 2.5 billion active Apple devices, processing billions of secure transactions, and keeping the technology that defines modern life running flawlessly, IS&T makes the impossible feel effortless. Do you love building solutions to handle global complexity and immense scale? Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, we don't just work. We innovate, create, and redefine what's possible. Every customer interaction is a chance to amaze, inspire, and connect, and by obsessing over the smallest details, we create experiences that leave a lasting impact.

Description

As the Manager of Engineering Program Management for Customer Systems, you will lead a team of Engineering Program Managers delivering complex, multi-year platform initiatives across a global contact center footprint. You will own the portfolio roadmap and delivery, the health of the team behind it, and the portfolio's overall budget and total cost of ownership. This role sits at the intersection of engineering, architecture, and business, partnering daily with Engineering leaders, Solution Architects, business stakeholders, and finance partners to turn strategy into executable roadmaps across the business units we support. Generative AI is central to how this team operates and what it delivers. You will drive adoption of GenAI and agentic tooling, so your team spends its time on judgment rather than administration, and you will be a credible partner to Engineering on the AI capabilities being built into the platform itself. Above all, we are looking for someone who challenges the norm, who looks at an accepted process, vendor roadmap, or architectural assumption and asks whether there is a fundamentally better way, then builds the analysis to prove it.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in technical program or engineering program management, delivering large, complex, cross-functional initiatives end-to-end.
• 5+ years of direct people management, including hiring, developing, and leading program managers or comparable senior individual contributors across geographically dispersed teams.
• Demonstrated ownership of program or portfolio budgets, including forecasting, cost allocation, TCO, and ROI evaluation.
• Comfortable owning accountability without full control of the resources delivering the work.
• Hands-on experience applying Generative AI tools and LLMs to program execution in areas such as technical documentation, automated status reporting, data synthesis, or decision support.
• Strong technical fluency; able to engage directly with engineers and architects, challenge assumptions, and dig into how the work is being done, not only whether it shipped.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with proven experience presenting to and influencing executive leadership.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience delivering large-scale platform migrations or legacy modernization while maintaining business continuity.
• Experience with agentic AI, LLM-powered workflows, or conversational AI in a production customer-facing environment.
• Experience partnering on vendor selection, contract negotiation, and licensing strategy for enterprise software.
• Experience with capacity-based staffing models and onshore/offshore optimization.
• Familiarity with data-driven decision-making; comfortable using usage, quality, and cost metrics to guide program direction.
• Certifications in Scrum (CSM), Agile, or Project Management (PMP) are a plus.
• Sharp analytical mindset and a bias toward simplifying rather than adding process.
• Experience in the contact center domain: CCaaS platforms, telephony and routing architecture, workforce management, or agent-facing systems.