Director of Engineering, Claris AI Services
Summary
Join Claris, an Apple subsidiary, as Director of Engineering for Claris AI Services. We are seeking an experienced engineering leader to own product development for a new AI-native cloud service
This role leads the engineering team building the service end to end: the AI answer pipeline and model orchestration, real-time access to external systems of record, the data foundation, the web application, and the APIs and gateway that tie them together. The service is built on Claris platform technology and runs in Apple's cloud, serving enterprise and education customers.
Description
You will partner daily with product management, program management, design, QA, and security, and you will own the delivery cadence: a release roughly every sprint, gated by feature flags, security review, and AI privacy review. Your leadership will determine how fast an early-stage product becomes a durable, scalable business.
Further detail on the product, roadmap, and team will be shared during the interview process.
Responsibilities
- Own engineering strategy and execution for the service across the AI layer, external data connectivity, data platform, frontend, and API layers. Set technical direction, make architecture calls, and hold the team to a high bar for quality and velocity.
- Build, mentor, and lead the Claris Cloud Services engineering team. Grow technical leadership within the team, raise the bar on hiring, and create a culture of ownership and follow-through.
- Drive the AI architecture of the product: retrieval and query planning over customer data, model orchestration and evaluation, prompt and pipeline quality, cost and latency management, and the accuracy of generated analysis. Establish how the team measures and improves answer quality over time.
- Own reliability and operational readiness for a multi-tenant SaaS service: availability targets, observability, incident response, on-call, and performance at customer scale.
- Ensure the product meets Apple and Claris standards for security, privacy, compliance, and data protection, and partner with security and AI privacy reviewers to clear those gates without stalling delivery.
- Run a predictable delivery system with product and program management: clear prioritization, credible commitments, transparent status, and release discipline including feature flag rollout and go/no-go criteria.
- Represent Claris Cloud Services engineering to Claris and Apple leadership. Communicate roadmap, tradeoffs, risk, and progress in terms executives and cross-functional partners can act on.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- 8+ years managing software engineering teams, with a demonstrated ability to build and lead high-performing teams
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, including cloud-based SaaS product development
- Proven track record shipping customer-facing SaaS products on a regular release cadence, with measurable improvement in quality and delivery predictability
- Strong understanding of GenAI architecture, including LLM application patterns, retrieval, tool and function calling, agent orchestration, and evaluation of model output quality
- Experience owning production services, including reliability, observability, incident response, and multi-tenant data isolation
- Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives from planning through execution in partnership with product and program management
- Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work effectively with stakeholders at all levels
- Strong leadership and interpersonal skills
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with agentic architectures and standardized tool and data interfaces such as the Model Context Protocol
- Experience leading globally distributed team
- Experience taking an early-stage product from initial traction to scale, including the shift from feature velocity to durability and cost efficiency
- Solid analytical, problem-solving, consultation, and organizational skills