Senior Engineering Program Manager, Lead - Service Special Projects

Apple Inc.; Cupertino, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 207,000 - 373,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical and dental coverage

Retirement benefits

Stock programs

Tuition reimbursement

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Apple Inc. seeks a Senior Engineering Program Manager, Lead for Service Special Projects in Cupertino. You will own end-to-end programs spanning client software, backend services, data systems, and ML capabilities, coordinating multiple teams from inception to launch.

You will translate technical discussions into clear leadership narratives, mentor other EPMs, and establish scalable operating rhythms to keep milestones and risks well managed in a fast-growing organization.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience developing program plans in a technical product environment.
• 3+ years in a lead or principal-level capacity.
• Experience leading AI-first programs end to end.
• Ability to read engineering design docs and evaluate trade-offs.
• Strong written and verbal communication with senior leadership.

Responsibilities

• Build and own plan of record for multi-team programs.
• Land AI/ML capabilities in production with quality gates and rollback criteria.
• Identify risks early and drive mitigation across senior stakeholders.
• Navigate ambiguity and create clarity as scope evolves.
• Track multiple parallel work streams in real time.
• Influence teams without direct authority across engineers, researchers and leaders.
• Establish scalable operating rhythms for planning and reviews.
• Present technical status and recommendations to executives.

Skills

Program management

AI/ML programs

Cross-functional leadership

Technical depth

Executive communication

Education

Bachelor's degree

MS or advanced degree

Tools

Jira

Planning systems

Dashboards

Job description

Senior Engineering Program Manager, Lead - Service Special Projects

Cupertino, California, United States Software and Services

We are looking for a highly seasoned Senior Engineering Program Manager to help get one of our most ambitious multi-year engineering programs off the ground. This is a hands-on, lead-level role for a seasoned program manager who has experience delivering large-scale and technically deep multi-team efforts from their inception. If you thrive when the problem is broad, the org is scaling up around them, and the technical stakes are high, this may be the role for you!

Description

In this role, you will be the connective tissue across engineering, research, design, and business functions from day one, turning ambitious goals into a coordinated, measurable plans that will drive our team forward. You will own the end-to-end program management of a large-scale, cross-functional engineering initiative spanning client software, backend services, large-scale data systems, applied machine learning, evaluation, tooling, and platform engineering. You will be accountable for the plan of record — roadmap, milestones, dependencies, risks, and the executive-level narrative — and for the operating cadence that keeps every team aligned on what is expected, by when, and why. You will need to be technical enough to hold your own in an architectural review and in a candid scoping conversation with a Principal Engineer. You will not write production code, but you will read designs, ask sharp questions, and translate deeply technical discussions into crisp, faithful summaries for leadership. When the program drifts, you will identify it early, name it clearly, and drive the correction with calm authority. This is a lead role. Alongside your own work-streams, you will shape the program management practice — mentoring other EPMs, standardizing how progress is tracked, and raising the bar for how we plan and communicate.

Responsibilities

• Building and owning a credible plan of record — roadmap, milestones, dependencies, critical path — for programs with dozens of engineers and multiple partner teams.
• Landing AI/ML capabilities in production — moving a system from research prototype through evaluation, hardening, and launch, with explicit quality bars and rollback criteria.
• Identifying risks early, developing mitigation strategies, and driving conflict resolution across senior technical stakeholders.
• Navigating ambiguity — creating clarity when scope, requirements, and priorities are still forming.
• Tracking many parallel work-streams in real time without losing the thread on any of them.
• Influencing and aligning teams without direct authority — including senior engineers, architects, applied researchers, and cross-functional leaders.
• Establishing durable operating rhythms — planning cycles, review cadences, escalation paths, postmortems — that scale with the program.
• Presenting technical status, trade-offs, and recommendations to executive audiences with precision and honesty.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelors Degree plus at least 15 years of experience developing program plans and managing complex, cross-functional engineering programs in a technical product environment, with at least 3+ years in a lead or principal-level capacity.
• Experience leading AI-first programs end to end — programs where the core product value is delivered by machine-learning or large-language-model systems, and where planning, scoping, and quality bars are inseparable from model behavior and evaluation.
• Demonstrated experience running programs that span multiple engineering disciplines — client, services, data, applied ML, platform, and tooling — end to end.
• Strong technical depth: able to read engineering design documents, follow architectural discussions across several disciplines, and independently reason about trade-offs, dependencies, and risk.
• Working literacy with the modern AI stack — model training and evaluation lifecycles, offline vs. online metrics, data pipelines feeding models, latency/cost trade-offs, and the difference between a research result and a production-ready capability.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including a track record of writing crisp executive updates and delivering technical narratives to senior leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

• MS or other advanced degree.
• Project Management Certifications.
• Experience with evaluation-driven engineering programs — where the definition of "done" depends on measured quality against explicit metrics.
• Fluency with modern engineering tooling — issue trackers, planning systems, dashboards — with a bias toward instrumenting programs so status is derived, not narrated.

Compensation & Benefits

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 $207,400 and $372,700, 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
• 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
• Additionally, this role might be eligible for 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.

Learn about accessibility in Apple’s workplace.

Learn about reasonable accommodations for job applicants.