Engineering Manager, Private Cloud Compute Inference Routing

At Apple, iCloud Platform Engineering builds the server stack behind Push Notifications, iMessage, FaceTime, iCloud, iCloud Private Relay and Private Cloud Compute (PCC), the backbone of Siri AI and Apple Intelligence. We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead PCC inference routing. These systems send every inference request to the right compute across a global, multi-region fleet, while keeping latency low, availability high and PCC's privacy guarantees intact.

This is a technically grounded leadership role for someone who thrives at scale, can bring clarity to complex and fast-changing environments, and is energized by building both systems and teams. You'll guide architectural direction, scale operational practices and develop the engineers and leaders who will shape how Apple delivers cloud inference.

Description

Routing LLM inference at Apple's scale takes systems that adapt to changing demand, available capacity and failures while keeping latency low and accelerator utilization high. As the fleet grows across regions and cells, routing must account for capacity and health across the whole fleet, not just a single site. PCC adds a basic architectural requirement: request content stays encrypted outside trusted compute nodes. You'll lead the design of routing and scheduling strategies within this privacy model.

Together with inference and security teams, you'll evaluate techniques such as cache-aware request placement and prefill/decode disaggregation. Your scope includes the inference AI gateway layer, where requests are authenticated, metered, prioritized and streamed back to clients, all without exposing request content.

This work has broad reach. Every improvement to routing makes Siri AI and Apple Intelligence faster and more reliable, and makes better use of Apple's inference capacity. In your first year, you'll be expected to grow a high-performing organization, set a clear technical roadmap, and measurably improve routing latency, availability and fleet utilization.

Responsibilities

• Direct the recruitment, development, and leadership for engineers and engineering managers responsible for PCC’s inference routing and request scheduling services, fostering an inclusive culture
• Establish technical strategy with senior engineers, guiding architectural decisions and complex trade-offs in global traffic management, capacity-aware placement, load balancing, and failover
• Translate organizational objectives into actionable roadmaps, execution plans, and measurable results
• Oversee delivery of adaptive routing, admission control, prioritization, and overload management to maintain service responsiveness and share capacity fairly across competing workloads
• Evolve inference AI gateway capabilities, including —including authentication, token-aware rate limiting and quotas, model and version routing, fallback and retries, and streaming response delivery—operating on request metadata to preserve end-to-end encryption
• Collaborate with model serving and infrastructure leaders to assess prefill/decode disaggregation and cache locality optimizations within PCC’s privacy architecture
• Develop and scale robust operations through observability, service-level objectives (SLOs), testing, safe deployment, and incident management in partnership with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Enhance efficiency via benchmarking and capacity-aware scheduling, leveraging queueing delay, latency, throughput, and utilization to guide investment
• Provide senior leadership with transparent updates on team health, technical risk, and strategic trade-offs, converting complex technical issues into actionable decisions
• Partner with Siri AI, Apple Intelligence, infrastructure, security, and SRE teams to deliver well-integrated routing capabilities

Minimum Qualifications

• Extensive software engineering experience with a demonstrated track record of leading teams that design, build, and operate large-scale distributed systems in production environments—whether through direct management, indirect oversight, or a combination thereof
• Proven ability to recruit, develop, and retain high-performing engineers and leaders
• Experience delivering API gateways (preferably inference AI gateways), request routing, load balancing, scheduling, or traffic management systems at scale
• Expertise of LLM inference serving, including request routing, KV-cache placement and reuse, prefill/decode disaggregation, and the tradeoffs between latency, throughput and accelerator use
• A record of shipping highly reliable systems in high-availability environments, including leading incident management, on-call and reliability practices
• Strong technical depth: capable of contributing meaningfully to architectural and design discussions with senior engineers, with a server development background in Java, C/C++, Go or Swift
• Ability to drive alignment and execution across teams in complex, matrixed environments
• Bachelor’s degree in an engineering discipline or equivalent professional experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven leadership in developing LLM inference serving or routing platforms (e.g., llm-d, NVIDIA Dynamo, vLLM, SGLang, or managed inference services)
• Experience building or running inference AI gateways and their core behaviors: token-based rate limiting and usage metering, multi-model routing with fallback, retries and circuit breaking, and streamingresponse handling
• Track record of scaling teams and organizations during rapid growth while maintaining top-tier hiring and engineering standards
• Experience delivering capacity tiers, reservations or QoS for high-volume workloads, and improving accelerator utilization through cross-region, capacity-aware routing
• Understanding of privacy-preserving system design: TLS, X.509, key management, Oblivious HTTP, remote attestation
• Experience designing and maturing observability practices, including SLO/SLI frameworks, distributed tracing and on-call culture
• Experience with container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes
• Demonstrated ability to build psychologically safe, high-trust team environments that attract and retain top talent
• Experience formulating multi-year roadmaps in collaboration with product, research, and senior leadership within large organizations that prioritize quality and reliability
• Pay & 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 $225,600 and $381,600, 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, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition. 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.