Product Design Leader
Summary
We are looking for a Product Design leader to drive the creation of Apple's Home hardware products. You will own the end-to-end product development lifecycle for a portfolio of products spanning audio, visual, and sensing domains, each with distinct identities but designed to work together as a coherent system. You will build and lead a high-performing PD organization, set the technical direction for new product architectures, and partner deeply with Industrial Design, Hardware Engineering, Silicon, Software, and Operations to deliver world-class hardware on aggressive timelines.
Description
You will lead Product Design for Apple's home hardware line, taking products from early architecture through mass production. This means owning mechanical architecture, system-level design, driving integration across electrical, thermal, acoustic, optical, and antenna domains, and ensuring products ship at Apple quality and scale.
Responsibilities
- Building, mentoring, and organizing a product development team capable of executing across multiple concurrent programs in varying stages of maturity
- Driving product architecture decisions that account for system-level tradeoffs: cost structure, silicon capability, thermal envelope, acoustic performance, and sensor integration
- Owning the detailed engineering development process from concept through EVT/DVT/PVT and into sustained production
- Partnering with Industrial Design to converge on product forms that serve both user experience and engineering feasibility
- Working closely with Software, AI/ML, and platform teams to ensure hardware designs enable evolving software capabilities, not just point-in-time feature sets
- Collaborating with Operations and manufacturing partners to drive design-for-manufacturing excellence and resolve production challenges
- Contributing to multi-year product roadmap planning, including technology bets and platform decisions that span across the product line
- Communicating product development status, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to executive leadership
- This role requires comfort with ambiguity, the ability to hold both near-term execution rigor and long-term architectural thinking simultaneously, and strong instincts for when to push for elegance versus when to converge. You will operate across many organizations that don't share a single reporting structure, so influence, credibility, and genuine partnership matter as much as technical depth.
Minimum Qualifications
- 10+ years experience in mechanical design, 8+ years in engineering management, preferably working experience in consumer electronics
- BS in Mechanical Engineering or related field
- Extensive experience in product development engineering, with significant time spent in engineering leadership roles, preferably in consumer electronics
- Track record of shipping high-volume, tightly integrated electromechanical products from concept through mass production
- Deep understanding of mechanical engineering fundamentals: materials, thermal management, structural analysis, tolerance systems, and manufacturing processes (injection molding, die casting, machining, stamping, extrusion, etc.)
- Strong design validation background: FEA, tolerance analysis, failure analysis, DOE, prototype-driven development
- Experience managing teams across multiple simultaneous programs at different lifecycle stages
Preferred Qualifications
- MS or advanced degree in engineering
- Experience leading product development for products where acoustic, optical, or sensor performance is central to the user experience
- Demonstrated ability to drive system-level architecture decisions that span mechanical, electrical, thermal, and software domains
- Familiarity with cost-driven design tradeoffs at scale, including silicon and module selection, BOM optimization, and platform reuse strategies
- Experience building or restructuring product development organizations
- Track record of effective cross-functional leadership in environments where key partners sit outside your reporting chain