Senior Engineering Program Manager, Appl Music - ML & Infrastructure, Apple Services Engineering

Summary

Apple Services is an exciting environment and a dynamic development organization. With customers around the world, we are a fast-growing marketplace for music, movies, TV shows, books, podcasts, and apps. We're looking for people who can partner with our Stakeholders and Engineering teams to ship complex, customer-facing music recommendation systems while also driving infrastructure-critical initiatives.

Description

You will bring deep technical domain expertise to drive server-side initiatives under tight release cycles, moving fluidly between ML experimentation and foundational data infrastructure work. This is not a task-based job; you will be responsible for successful outcomes and delivery. Strong fundamentals are a requirement but you have more. You take responsibility; you feel a personal stake in the product you ship; you communicate responsibilities and scope clearly; you value integrity; you thrive in conflict; you know how things work; you work for the success of the entire Program Management team; you thrive in uncertainty and strive to bring order to it; you have deep wisdom and judgment; you keep your eye on the ball; you build strong relationships; you are aware of politics but do not get mired in them; you are constantly looking to improve yourself and your team; and you ship code which millions of customers will use.

Responsibilities

• Lead projects/programs through the software development lifecycle from planning (which includes scoping, prioritizing, resource allocation, and timelines) to launch
• Partner with stakeholders to create functional and technical requirements for recommendation systems, A/B testing programs, including data infrastructure initiatives
• Drive cross-org coordination across Privacy Engineering, ML teams, platform teams, client engineering, and service owners to align on sequenced delivery plans
• Collaborate with Engineering, Design, Product, QA, Legal, Finance, Privacy, Marketing, Operations, and other organizations both inside and outside of Apple to support personalization features and foundational infrastructure in Apple Music
• Translate deeply technical work, whether ML model performance or infrastructure migration status into clear executive updates and risk assessments
• Flexible working with teams across US timezones
• Help establish processes to improve how our products are built and executed

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years work experience as an Engineering Program Manager
• Strong technical program manager with a proven track record in driving software development initiatives
• Knowledge of key technologies and systems involved in big data processing, machine learning, and distributed systems
• Demonstrated ability to manage complex dependency chains across multiple engineering organizations
• BS in Computer Science, Engineering or related technical filed or equivalent industry experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience driving ML/recommendation system programs and data infrastructure initiatives including A/B testing frameworks, experiment design, GenAI, and interpreting ML model metrics to inform product decisions.
• Experience with privacy/compliance-gated engineering work including navigating privacy reviews & requests, and translating legal/compliance requirements into engineering timelines.
• Understanding of waterfall and agile project management methodologies
• Experience as an embedded EPM, directly supporting engineering teams by facilitating agile ceremonies (e.g., sprint and capacity planning) and managing release documentation
• Strong facilitation skills to drive complex, cross-functional, and comprehensive projects
• Exceptional verbal and written communication, including presentation skills to all levels of an organization
• Comfortable operating in extended ambiguity; able to drive urgency on infrastructure timelines without losing momentum on feature delivery
• Experience with establishing processes and/or team culture
• Passionate about protecting privacy while delivering key product insights
• Prior software development experience is a plus
• Experience in music industry a plus