Systems SRE - Shanghai - Tech Lead Manager

Summary

People at Apple don't just build products — they craft the kind of experiences that have revolutionized entire industries. The diverse collection of our people and their ideas inspire innovation in everything we do. Imagine what you could do here! Join Apple, and help us leave the world better than we found it.

The Apple Services Engineering (ASE) team builds and provides systems and infrastructure that power Apple's services (such as iCloud, Apple Music, Apple Intelligence, and Maps). We are the foundation on which Apple's software developers build the products that our customers love. Our services have to scale globally, stay highly available, and "just work."

We are looking for a hands-on SRE Manager to build and lead a multi-disciplinary infrastructure team in China. The team covers three foundational areas:

• Developer Productivity: the source control, artifact management, and build platforms (GitHub, Artifactory, CI/build systems) that Apple engineers rely on every day.
• Fleet Management: lifecycle of bare-metal infrastructure across Apple data centers, including provisioning, hardware validation, firmware, OS deployment, and configuration management.
• Security SRE: foundational security services such as host access, disk encryption, identity, and authentication, which protect Apple's fleet and its most critical data.

  Description

  This is a player-coach role. The team is small and spans several domains, so you will lead from the front: debug production issues, review designs and code, and build automation alongside your engineers while hiring, growing, and managing them. You will be the local leader for Apple's infrastructure presence in China, partnering with the US, and European teams that own each domain's roadmap, and making sure work in China is well-scoped, well-supported, and delivered to the same reliability and security bar.

You will own operational excellence across all three areas: SLOs, incident response, on-call health, change safety, and steady reduction of toil through software. You will also be the link between the China team and the domain leaders for each area, balancing priorities across them and raising risks early.

This is a foundational role. The team will start small, and we expect it to grow as Apple's infrastructure investment in China expands. You will play a key role in shaping its scope, hiring, and culture as it grows.

Responsibilities

• Hire, lead, mentor, and grow a team of SRE and infrastructure engineers across Fleet Management, Developer Productivity, and Security SRE.
• Stay hands-on: troubleshoot across the full stack (hardware, firmware, OS, network, application), review designs and code, and help with automation and tooling.
• Own the reliability, availability, and performance of the services the team supports, including SLO definition, monitoring, alerting, and capacity planning.
• Run incident response and post-incident reviews, and drive systemic fixes rather than one-off remediations.
• Set up a sustainable on-call model that fits well with global follow-the-sun coverage.
• Drive safe change management and staged rollouts for infrastructure that the rest of Apple builds on.
• Work with domain leaders and partner teams in the US and Europe to align priorities, plan execution, and keep visibility high in both directions.
• Promote security-by-default practices across the team, including host hardening, access controls, and secure packaging.
• Use AI-assisted tooling to speed up triage, operational workflows, and engineering productivity.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years in SRE, production engineering, or infrastructure roles operating large-scale distributed systems, including 3+ years managing engineers.
• Hands-on technical depth: able to debug production issues and write and review code in at least one of Python, Go, or Java.
• Strong Linux and systems fundamentals: OS internals, networking, storage, performance, and systems management.
• Solid understanding of SRE principles: SLOs and error budgets, monitoring and alerting, incident management, fault analysis, and capacity planning.
• Experience with configuration management and infrastructure as code (Puppet, Ansible, Chef, Terraform, or similar).
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerization.
• Track record of leading a team across more than one technical domain or service area.
• Excellent written and spoken English and Mandarin, and the ability to communicate clearly with global teams across time zones.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with bare-metal provisioning and hardware lifecycle at data center scale (PXE/iPXE, BMC/Redfish, firmware management, OS imaging).
• Experience operating developer platforms such as GitHub Enterprise, Artifactory or Nexus, and CI/build systems (Jenkins or similar).
• Knowledge of Linux security primitives: SELinux, PAM/SSH access controls, disk encryption, identity and authentication systems, and container security.
• Experience operating infrastructure as an internal managed service with defined SLAs.
• Observability experience (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or similar).
• Experience operating infrastructure in China, including local cloud providers (e.g., Alibaba Cloud), cross-border connectivity, and local compliance and data-residency requirements.
• Experience building a new team or site from the ground up.

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity, and thus we treat all applicants fairly and equally. Apple is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to applicants with physical and mental disabilities.