Observability SRE Manager, Apple Services Engineering

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The Apple Services Engineering (ASE) team builds and provides systems and infrastructure that fuel Apple's services (such as iCloud, iTunes, Siri, and Maps). We are the foundation on which Apple's software developers build the products that our customers love.

Apple's observability and monitoring platforms are the nervous system behind the reliability of Apple's cloud services, giving thousands of engineers the visibility they need to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues before they impact customers. Our cloud monitoring platform analyzes billions of metrics per minute and is the first place incident responders turn when something goes wrong, regardless of system scale or complexity.

We're looking for a senior SRE leader to own and evolve this platform: the metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting infrastructure that underpins operational excellence across Apple Services Engineering.

Description

You'll set technical direction for reliability and operational excellence while mentoring engineers, driving automation, and partnering closely with software, infrastructure, finance, and product teams to uphold the reliability of the platform whilst shipping improvements that matter at Apple scale.

This is a senior leadership position that defines where our observability platform reliability, scalability and performance goes next, how our SRE practice evolves, including how AI reshapes it, and how we build the team and partnerships to get there. You will lead engineers solving reliability and scale problems few organizations encounter, integrating monitoring seamlessly across disparate infrastructures, hardware, software, application, and network layers, at a scale built to reach every user on the planet.

You'll build a team culture that makes SRE sustainable, rewarding, and central to how Apple ships services.

The successful candidate has a strong aptitude for both technical leadership and people management, with the ability to context-switch between strategic planning and tactical execution. You should be comfortable building and scaling teams, driving complex cross-functional initiatives, and thriving under pressure, while creating an inclusive, high-trust team culture where engineers do their best work.

We believe AI will fundamentally reshape how SRE is practiced, from anomaly detection and root-cause analysis to capacity planning and toil elimination, and we're looking for a leader who shares that conviction and can drive that transformation across the organization.

Responsibilities

• Technical & Operational Leadership
• Own the reliability, availability, and performance of Apple's observability platform (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting) and the self-service capabilities built on top of it
• Lead staging and production environments for the observability platform with the goal of maximizing availability
• Ensure the platform accurately monitors the health of every application and piece of infrastructure across the Apple ecosystem, the "central nervous system" that other engineering teams and incident responders reach for first
• Define and drive the strategic roadmap for observability infrastructure in partnership with SRE, engineering, and product stakeholders
• Establish and refine SRE practices including SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, scale testing, disaster recovery, and change management
• Guide deep dives into systemic and latent reliability issues spanning the full stack (hardware, software, application, and network), partnering with software and systems engineers to drive fixes to resolution
• Drive incident response, post-incident reviews, and systemic improvements that reduce operational toil
• Champion automation to eliminate manual processes through tooling, self-service platforms, and APIs for internal customers
• Manage on-call rotations and ensure sustainable, well-supported operational coverage
• Drive standardization of monitoring and troubleshooting methodology across embedded SREs and services throughout the organization
• Represent the SRE organization in design reviews and operational readiness exercises for new and existing services
• Partner with software engineering and architecture teams to influence system design for reliability, scalability, and operability
• Balance technical debt reduction with feature development to maintain platform health
• AI & Modernization
• Define and execute a clear AI strategy for the SRE organization, identifying high-impact opportunities where AI/ML tooling can reduce toil, accelerate root-cause analysis, and improve reliability outcomes
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted tooling (copilots, intelligent runbooks, LLM-based diagnostics, anomaly detection) into day-to-day SRE workflows
• Build a culture where engineers actively experiment with AI tools and modern approaches to solve operational problems
• People Leadership & Org Building
• Lead, grow, and mentor a team of Site Reliability Engineers, conducting regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development discussions
• Hire and build out the SRE team, with a desire to develop engineers to meet both their career goals and the organization's goals
• Build and scale a high-performing team through coaching, clear expectations, and psychological safety
• Foster an inclusive team culture and mentor diverse talent
• Champion engineering best practices for code quality, system design, and operational excellence across the broader organization
• Cross-Functional & Executive Communication
• Build strong partnerships across Apple, negotiating priorities and aligning on shared goals with an Apple-first mindset
• Represent the SRE perspective in cross-functional planning, translating reliability requirements into architecture and investment decisions
• Communicate effectively at the executive level, presenting strategy, trade-offs, and progress to senior leadership
• Drive standardization and best practices across the observability and infrastructure landscape

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of engineering management experience leading SRE, infrastructure, or observability/monitoring teams
• Experience hiring and leading engineers, with a desire to build, grow, and mentor a team
• Deep understanding of observability systems and practices: metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, SLOs, error budgets, and fault analysis at scale
• Strong systems background, comfortable troubleshooting across the full stack (network, OS, container runtime, application)
• Experience operating large-scale, multi-tenant distributed systems in production, including Kubernetes environments
• Practical, solid knowledge of shell/bash scripting and at least one higher-level production language (Python preferred; Go, Java, or Scala also valued)
• Demonstrated experience applying AI/ML tooling or LLM-based solutions to improve SRE or infrastructure operations
• Track record of building high-performing teams through coaching, clear expectations, and psychological safety
• Demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional initiatives to completion and communicate at the executive level
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep familiarity with the Prometheus ecosystem and cloud-native observability stacks (Thanos, Splunk, OpenTelemetry, or similar)
• Experience with third-party cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible)
• Comfortable with open-source configuration management and orchestration tools (Helm, Puppet, Spinnaker)
• Demonstrable knowledge of TCP/IP, HTTP, web application security, and multi-tier web application architectures
• Experience running infrastructure as an internal managed service with defined SLAs
• Familiarity with microservices architecture and container orchestration with Kubernetes at scale
• Background in capacity planning, performance engineering, or infrastructure architecture
• Track record of driving cultural and process transformation within SRE organizations
• Experience building or deploying AI-powered operational tooling (AIOps, intelligent alerting, automated diagnostics)
• Developing and delivering multi-mode communications tailored to the unique needs of different audiences
• Anticipating and balancing the needs of multiple stakeholders
• Making sense of complex, high-quantity, and sometimes contradictory information to solve problems effectively
• Rebounding from setbacks and adversity when facing difficult situations
• Knowing the most effective and efficient processes to get things done, with a focus on continuous improvement
• 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 $338,400, 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, 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.