Software Engineering Manager, ASE Commerce Engineering
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About the role
The Engineering Manager leads a team of software engineers building and operating server- side commerce systems at Apple Services Engineering. You will be responsible for the team's technical direction, delivery, and growth. Day to day, that means partnering with your engineers on design and execution, working across Apple Services Engineering and partner organizations to land roadmap commitments, and investing in the development of the people on your team. This is a technically engaged management role. You will maintain active involvement in the codebase through code reviews, design discussions, and direct contributions when the situation calls for it. You will serve as a credible technical partner to your team, able to identify technical risk and quality gaps through design engagement and code review.
Responsibilities
- Manage a team of 3 to 5 software engineers, with a focus on career development, regular 1:1s, structured feedback, and performance support
- Own delivery for your team's roadmap from scoping through production rollout, and keep partners informed proactively when plans change
- Guide technical direction on commerce, tax, accounting, and reporting systems, working with senior engineers on architecture decisions and trade-offs
- Maintain active technical engagement with the codebase through code reviews and, when the situation calls for it, direct contributions
- Partner with product, design, program management, and peer engineering teams to define and ship features
- Improve and maintain standards for operational health -- including on-call processes, incident response, system performance, and code quality that produces maintainable, long-term value
- Support engineers in their career growth, provide specific and constructive feedback, and create opportunities for them to take on expanded scope and responsibility
- Make decisions in ambiguous situations and communicate the rationale clearly and transparently to your team and stakeholders
- Maintain rigorous standards for customer privacy and security in all systems the team designs and operates
Requirements
- Experience managing teams that own commerce, payments, billing, or subscription systems, including familiarity with the operational and compliance considerations specific to those domains
- Demonstrated track record of developing engineers, helping mid-level individual contributors grow into senior roles and senior engineers expand into broader technical or organizational scope
- Experience re-platforming or scaling backend systems that were undergoing significant growth. related challenges, including managing the technical and delivery complexity of that transition
- Familiarity with the regulatory, tax, and compliance considerations involved in operating a global commerce platform across multiple jurisdictions and currencies
- Some exposure to frontend or client-side development, sufficient to collaborate effectively with client platform teams on feature integration and API design
- Experience working with distributed or globally located teams, including navigating cross-timezone coordination and asynchronous communication norms
- Comfort presenting technical strategy and team progress to senior leadership, including the ability to tailor communication to a non-engineering executive audience
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 1 to 2 years of direct people management or equivalent experience leading engineers as a technical lead or project lead
- Production experience with Java and service-oriented or microservices architectures, including design, deployment, and ongoing operation of backend services
- Sufficient technical engagement to conduct meaningful code reviews, contribute to architectural design discussions, and identify technical risk in systems under active development
- Working knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases -- including data modeling, query optimization, and operational considerations for systems such as Cassandra or equivalent distributed datastores
- Experience shipping and operating RESTful services at scale, wi
Additional Information
Apple Services Engineering is behind the App Store, Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Apple Books -- the storefronts and services hundreds of millions of customers reach for every day. Within Apple Services Engineering, the Commerce team owns the systems that handle purchases and subscriptions for those customers and for the developers who build on our platforms. We are hiring an Engineering Manager to lead a small team in Commerce. If you are drawn to leading a team that ships work with direct, measurable customer impact -- a smoother checkout experience, a subscription that launches reliably in a new country, a billing system that holds up under peak load -- this role offers that scope. You will encounter technically complex problems, a collaborative team, and a scale of systems that is difficult to find anywhere else.
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