Sr. Engineering Leader, Foundation Data Platform - Wallet, Payments & Commerce

Summary

At Apple, great ideas become extraordinary products, services, and customer experiences with remarkable speed. Wallet, Payments and Commerce (WPC) is at the center of that work, powering experiences like Apple Pay, Apple Cash, and Tap to Pay that are redefining how the world pays and interacts with commerce. If you are a seasoned engineering leader who thrives at the intersection of platform strategy, technical depth, and team building, this is your opportunity to do the most impactful work of your career.

The WPC Data Foundation team builds the petabyte-scale data infrastructure that powers analytics, marketing, strategy, product management, and real-time observability across every WPC product and service. We are looking for a high-impact Senior Engineering Leader to own the technical direction, integration strategy, and team development of this critical foundation.

About the role

As a Senior Engineering Leader on the WPC Data Foundation team, you will lead the team responsible for extending Apple's enterprise data platform to meet the domain-specific needs of commerce, partner, and channel data. This is a role defined by extension and integration, not by building from scratch. Your mandate is to close the gap between what Apple's central platform provides and what WPC requires, with precision and rigor, ensuring that everything warranting a shared solution flows through Apple's platform as intended.

This role demands both technical depth and strategic judgment. You will lead the team that draws the line: what to consume as-is, what to extend, what belongs in WPC's layer, and what to push upstream for the benefit of the broader organization.

You will partner with your engineers and cross-functional platform teams on technical direction, architecture, and roadmap decisions, ensuring the foundation meets the high bar for scale, reliability, and governance expected of Apple's financial and commerce systems. Success in this role is measured, in part, by how little WPC-specific infrastructure your team needs to create.

Parts of your roadmap will be shaped by platform teams outside your organization, and navigating that effectively is central to how this role creates impact.

This is a rare opportunity to build the data foundation that an entire world-class commerce platform depends on, within one of the most sophisticated engineering ecosystems in the world.

Responsibilities

• Platform Strategy and Build Judgment: Define what to build, what to extend, and what to consume from Apple's platform, and shape central platform roadmaps through well-formed requirements and trusted relationships.
• Technical Leadership and Integration: Maintain credible technical depth across design reviews and hold the seams between platforms, such as identity, lineage, schema contracts, and observability, to a high standard.
• Team Building and Talent Development: Build teams with complementary strengths, grow engineers and leaders from within, and measure team health by where people go next.
• Delivery and Internal Customer Experience: Own end-to-end delivery of multi-quarter programs and measure success by adoption, onboarding time, data freshness, and cost; not just activity.
• Operational Excellence and Governance: Build and sustain the on-call, SLO, and incident practices required for systems where data quality is a business event, and uphold Apple's privacy and security posture throughout.

Minimum Qualifications

• Seasoned leader in software and platform engineering, with solid experience leading engineering teams that include engineering managers, senior and staff-level ICs.
• Demonstrated ownership of data systems at petabyte scale in production, including actual volumes, ingest rates, and consumer counts you were accountable for.
• Proven experience building on top of a shared or central platform you did not own, extending it, integrating with it, and influencing its roadmap.
• At least one clear example of securing a capability from another team's roadmap rather than building around them.
• Hands-on background in distributed processing, streaming, and large-scale storage, sufficient to lead technical direction credibly.
• Track record of hiring and growing engineering talent and building durable team structure.
• Demonstrated delivery of multi-quarter programs with significant cross-organizational dependencies.
• Excellent written communication; drives alignment through structured documents, not only through meetings.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading teams serving both real-time and batch consumers on a unified data foundation.
• Background in commerce, partner, payments, or supply chain data domains.
• Familiarity with federated data ownership and data mesh models, with a clear-eyed view of where they add value.
• Demonstrated cost efficiency at scale without regressing reliability or developer experience.