Manager, Engineering Program Management - Ai & Data Platforms (AiDP)

Summary

Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, great ideas quickly become great products, services, and customer experiences. Bring passion and dedication to your work, and you never know what you could accomplish.

AI & Data Platforms (AiDP) is IS&T's engine for AI-powered innovation. The team brings together data, application development, and machine learning—including generative AI—along with data services and customer success functions to help IS&T build solutions more efficiently and streamline the adoption and embedding of generative AI across Apple.

The Ai and Data Platform (AiDP) team is a new, growing team building, deploying, and trusting AI agents with next-generation AI, ML, Data, and Developer platforms, including GenAI. The team brings together data, application development, and machine learning — including generative AI (GenAI) — along with data services. This includes managing large-scale data platforms and integrating them with GenAI.

About the role

You will lead and develop a team of Engineering Project/Program Managers (EPMs) and partner with engineering, platform, and site reliability engineering teams in the Data Service platform group. You will translate strategies into programs, including scope management, deliverables, stakeholder management, and risk/dependency management across the Data Service Platform.

You will drive and oversee program direction by outlining goals and supervising a project portfolio across various platforms and services. You will drive planning and delivery processes to deploy features on time. You will influence the project portfolio to maximize business outcomes with the given resource investment. You will identify efficiency opportunities and track business impact through metrics such as product usage, cost avoidance, and cost per user.

Responsibilities

• Build, lead, and grow a team of senior Engineering Program Managers. Own hiring, career development, performance, and succession planning.
• Partner with engineering managers and directors to set the multi-year strategy and roadmap for Data Services. The platforms cover relational, NoSQL, search, vector, graph, cache, and streaming technologies across private and public cloud (AWS, GCP, AliCloud).
• Own the program portfolio of 30+ concurrent programs. Prioritize investment, balance headcount and cloud spend, and make clear calls on what to fund, delay, or stop.
• Design and own the organization’s operating model: planning cycles, program reviews, QBRs, and executive readouts. Lead senior decision forums and drive outcomes to closure.
• Act as the senior program partner to engineering, SRE, product, security, privacy, finance, procurement, and cloud vendors. Represent Data Services in cross-organization and executive settings.
• Lead strategic infrastructure programs, including multi-cloud and hybrid deployments, large migrations, resilience and disaster recovery, and capacity planning.
• Own TCO and efficiency goals. Set the metrics framework (usage, cost avoidance, cost per user, reliability) and report business impact to leadership.
• Lead program process improvement, including using enterprise GenAI tools to automate reporting and scale the team’s impact.

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of technical program management in engineering organizations
• 4+ years managing people, including managing senior EPMs or technical program managers
• A track record of owning a large, cross-functional infrastructure or data platform portfolio with director-level visibility
• Strong technical understanding of database and data platform architecture such as Postgres, MongoDB, CockroachDB, Snowflake, SingleStore, or vector databases like Milvus.
• Experience shaping strategy, managing budgets or headcount, and influencing senior leaders without direct authority.
• BA/BS in Computer Science or related field, or relevant industry experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience growing an EPM function.
• Experience with agile project management and software development
• Experience with private or hybrid cloud, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and build and release systems
• Experience with FinOps or TCO modeling and negotiating with cloud vendors.
• Naturally accountable and responsible: Self-starter, self-motivated, disciplined, and self-sufficient
• A hands-on software engineering or SRE background
• A history of improving processes across an organization using metrics.
• Strong sense of ownership, customer service, and integrity
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, written and verbal, to all levels of an organization
• Project Management certification is a plus