Director, Product Management - Platforms (Apple Store Online)

Summary

Imagine what you could do here! The people here at Apple don’t just create products - they build the kind of wonder that’s revolutionized entire industries. It’s the diversity of those people and their ideas that inspires the innovation that runs through everything we do, from amazing technology to industry-leading environmental efforts. At Apple, inclusion is a shared responsibility, and we work together to foster a culture where everyone belongs and is inspired to do their best work.

Here on the Apple Store Online team, we are responsible for Apple’s largest store. Our main goal is to deliver a magical, personal digital experience where customers can shop, buy and learn everything Apple, wherever they are. Each customer should feel like they are our only customer and our job is to set the bar for the experience they receive. To run such an extraordinary store, it takes extraordinary people, and we are looking for someone to help us do extraordinary things.

Apple is looking for a Director of Product to lead, inspire, and drive innovation from within the Platform team for the Apple Store Online. The Platform team is responsible for the content management, asset management, product information management, and syndication management systems that bring our Apple experiences to life. Together, these systems form the foundation of our e-commerce site, and directly influence the potential and speed in which we can innovate. In this role, the architectural and platform capability decisions that you make will set the course of our success - for decades to come!

About the role

In this role, you will be responsible for driving a multi-year re-platform initiative for our e-commerce platform, as well as defining new capabilities supporting future customer-facing features being defined by our User Experience product teams. This is a technical role that links business, design, and engineering to deliver incredible experiences and products to our customers. You’ll work cross-functionally with Product, Program, Product Marketing, Merchandising, Digital Content Management, Engineering, Operations, and more, to ensure complete and end-to-end platform and workflow design.

You will navigate the course for us to modernize our architecture, challenge old assumptions, and bring the flexibility and dynamism that our business teams need to take us into the future - all while keeping our existing multi-billion dollar business running flawlessly. You’ll contend with scalability challenges only a few retailers ever get to experience, and play a key role in bringing Apple’s amazing shopping experiences to life.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10-15+ years of proven experience in Technical Product Management, and/or Engineering Management role, with a focus on platform development.
• 7+ years senior management experience building and leading large, technical, and globally distributed teams.
• BA/BS in Computer Science or equivalently technical degree.
• Experience shaping multi-year strategy and roadmap for e-commerce platforms, and connecting the dots across business goals, customer needs, architectural / technical capabilities, into a single big-picture vision and storyline.
• Deep hands-on technical fluency; able to create and read complex system designs, evaluate trade-offs, and engage credibly with engineers on web technologies, large-scale distributed/service architectures, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and data pipelines.
• Deep understanding of how modern e-commerce platforms are built, including microservices, payment and checkout systems, catalog/inventory services, and platform scalability and reliability.

Preferred Qualifications

• MS in Computer Science or equivalently technical degree.
• Expert-level skill in building relationships, establishing rapport, credibility and influence, in order to attain results across a large, matrixed organization.
• Adept at building relationships at a senior executive level, across business units and geographical boundaries.
• Highly skilled at building strong team culture with a focus on team and individual development.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with a focus on storytelling and an ability to craft the narrative to influence team members.
• Comfort with challenging conventions and debating solutions, to identify the best possible outcome for customers.
• Prior experience leading teams in multi-lingual/cultural environment, effectively motivating and influencing in a matrix environment, including at a senior level.
• Self-directed, highly agile with outstanding organizational skills, effective in high-pressure environments, and an exemplary team leader.
• Demonstrated strong analytical skills, comfortable working in ambiguous environments, and adept in use of data and metrics to support assumptions and decisions.
• Enthusiastic, hard-working leader who can motivate, encourage and lead a team through ambiguous situations. Assertive, goal driven, self-confident, and adventurous.
• Experience planning, running, and delivering large multi-year operational projects - from ideation to execution.
• Proficient with emerging technologies like AI, Deep Learning, and their practical applications in digital commerce applications - personalization, search, recommendations, payments, etc.
• Experience leading an e-commerce re-platform, where scale, speed, and ability to innovate were the focus.