Manager, Technology Compliance, Greater China
Summary
Do you want to help build some of the largest and most consequential enterprise and customer technology systems in the world? Join Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization. IS&T is the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. It’s Apple’s central nervous system. Supporting 2.5 billion active Apple devices, processing billions of secure transactions, and keeping the technology that defines modern life running flawlessly, IS&T makes the impossible feel effortless.
Do you love building solutions to handle global complexity and immense scale? Imagine what you could do here.
Business Operations, Employee Engagement, and Strategy is part of IS&T and shapes the strategy, operations, and culture of IS&T. The team oversees business planning, IS&T’s partnership strategy across Apple, and the technology tools that support the organization’s day-to-day operations. This team also leads IS&T’s enterprise generative AI strategy and manages compliance across systems. Through its communications and employee programs, it champions the growth, inclusion, and development of everyone in IS&T and drives the standard for IS&T brand and product communications across Apple.
Description
Apple's IS&T Greater China Compliance organization is seeking a Manager in Shanghai to lead our compliance team in China and own the compliance posture of solutions running in-country. This is a broad remit spanning privacy, financial, payment, and information security regimes — including PIPL, SOX, PCI DSS, MLPS, and other applicable Chinese and global requirements — across a complex enterprise technology landscape.
You will define how IS&T demonstrates compliance for in-country systems: designing the programs, standing up the controls, evidence, and monitoring that operate them, and hiring and developing the team that delivers them. Privacy and personal information protection are a significant part of this remit, but not the whole of it — you'll be equally comfortable reasoning about financial reporting controls, cardholder data environments, and information security grading and filing obligations.
This is a hands-on leadership role, and it carries the technical and business depth of a senior individual contributor in addition to people leadership. At Apple, managers are expected to be in the details: reading the regulation, reviewing the assessment, sitting in the design review, and querying the data themselves. You'll set direction and remove obstacles for your team, and you'll also do the work alongside them — because credibility with engineering partners is earned through technical depth, not org charts.
You will partner closely with the US-based IS&T Security, Privacy, and Compliance team, as well as individuals in Legal, Privacy, Information Security, Internal Audit, Finance, Engineering, and other organizations to establish a coordinated, risk-based approach to identifying, assessing, governing, and monitoring in-scope systems and processing activities. You'll also partner closely with a peer compliance team in the United States, sharing methodology, tooling, and lessons learned so that both regions operate to a consistent standard while meeting the distinct requirements of their jurisdictions. You'll bring the rigor of an auditor, the discipline of a program leader, and the technical depth to propose and reason about data platforms, pipelines, and data at scale.
Responsibilities
- Strategy: Define the multi-year compliance strategy and roadmap for IS&T solutions in China across PIPL, SOX, PCI DSS, MLPS, and other applicable regimes. Anticipate emerging regulatory obligations, assess their impact on Apple's systems and data, and shape the organization's response before requirements land.
- Program design: Architect compliance programs from first principles — control frameworks, assessment methodologies, evidence and testing approaches, governance forums, intake and escalation paths, and the metrics that prove they work. Where obligations overlap across regimes, design a common control set once and map it to many, rather than running parallel programs.
- Build and lead the team: Define the team's shape and hire against it, growing a group of compliance professionals in China from the ground up. Set a high bar for analytical rigor and written clarity, establish career paths, give direct feedback, and create the conditions for people to do the best work of their careers.
- Privacy and personal information protection: Own PIPL compliance for in-country solutions — governance of high-risk personal information processing, privacy assessments, data subject rights enablement, and cross-border data transfer requirements.
- Stay in the details: Personally review assessments, findings, control designs, evidence packages, and reporting. Engage directly in technical design reviews and regulatory analysis. Maintain enough hands-on fluency with the data and systems to validate your team's conclusions and to be a credible partner to engineering leaders.
- Design review and control fit: Evaluate proposed architectures, data flows, and technical designs to assess their fit with control objectives — identifying where a design satisfies requirements, where it falls short, and what alternatives would meet the objective more efficiently. Engage engineering teams early, so controls are built in rather than retrofitted.
- Requirements translation: Partner with Legal, Privacy, and Internal Audit to convert regulatory obligations and internal policy into practical, testable control requirements and repeatable operating processes.
- Audit and assessment readiness: Own readiness for internal and external audits, assessments, and regulatory filings affecting in-country solutions. Coordinate with auditors and assessors, manage evidence collection, and drive findings to closure.
- Risk governance and accountability: Own the risk picture for solutions running in China. Drive findings and commitments to closure, escalate with clarity, and hold owners across the organization accountable for outcomes.
- Monitoring and reporting: Establish monitoring, metrics, and dashboards that give engineering leaders and executives a clear, honest view of compliance posture and emerging risk. Present to senior leadership in China and globally, and translate technical detail into decisions.
- Cross-functional and cross-region leadership: Build strong relationships within China, with the sister compliance team in the United States, and with Apple's global functions and partner organizations. Bridge in-country requirements and global standards, drive alignment across time zones, and foster a unified approach to program goals.
- Enablement and advocacy: Champion adoption of compliance platforms, tooling, and standards across the organization. Lead education and awareness initiatives in partnership with engineering teams.
Minimum Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience in technology compliance, IT audit, risk management, information security, privacy, or data governance
- 2+ years of experience leading teams, or leading large cross-functional programs with demonstrated ownership of scope, staffing, and outcomes
- Experience hiring, coaching, and developing people, or a clear track record of technical mentorship and readiness to build a team
- Experience defining compliance or risk program strategy and designing the frameworks, methodologies, and controls that operationalize it
- Hands-on experience across multiple compliance regimes, such as PIPL, SOX / ITGC, PCI DSS, MLPS, GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, ISO 27001, or comparable frameworks
- Experience with regulatory requirements applicable to technology operations in China
- Experience with data classification, data governance, data inventories, or data-flow mapping
- Familiarity with cloud environments, enterprise applications, APIs, data platforms, and software development life cycle methodologies
- Ability to evaluate technical designs and architectures against control objectives and articulate gaps to both engineering and non-technical audiences
- Demonstrated ability to translate regulatory, policy, or control requirements into practical and scalable processes
- Experience influencing senior stakeholders and building consensus across matrixed, cross-functional organizations
- Professional fluency in both Mandarin and English, with strong written and verbal communication skills in each, including the ability to frame complex concepts for executive audiences
- Ability to operate effectively in an ambiguous, evolving regulatory environment and to set direction for others within it
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience
Preferred Qualifications
- Audit or advisory experience at a Big 4 or comparable professional services firm, including experience leading engagement teams
- Experience building a compliance, privacy, or risk function from an early stage
- Experience with PIPL implementation at scale, including cross-border data transfer governance and security assessment or standard contract filing
- Experience managing SOX ITGC scoping, testing, and remediation cycles for enterprise systems
- Experience with PCI DSS assessments, including scoping of cardholder data environments
- Experience with MLPS grading, filing, and remediation, or with Chinese cybersecurity and data security regulatory engagement
- Experience with Privacy Impact Assessments, Data Protection Impact Assessments, or similar risk assessment methodologies
- Proficiency in SQL and familiarity with Python and large-scale data ecosystems; comfort applying data science concepts to compliance monitoring
- Proficiency with AI tools and techniques — using generative AI and ML-based agents to automate analytical and compliance workflows, accelerate assessment and evidence review, and expand monitoring capabilities at scale
- Experience working across global and in-country teams in a multinational organization
- Privacy, risk, audit, security, or compliance certifications (e.g., CIPP, CIPM, CISA, CISSP, CRISC, PCI ISA/QSA)
- Excellent presentation and storytelling skills
- Advanced degree in a technical, quantitative, legal, or related field