SDET Manager, Mail & Messages Automated Testing Frameworks

Apple•San Diego, CA

44d

About The Position

Mail and Messages is a big part on how humanity communicates — the everyday check-ins, the moments that matter, the news we can't wait to share. As the SDET Manager for Mail & Messages Automated Testing Frameworks, you will lead the engineers who make sure those experiences are fast, reliable, accessible, and private on every Apple device. You won't just test these apps — you'll engineer testability into them, inventing the frameworks and in-product tools that let us prove quality at scale. This is a ground-floor opportunity to help shape a growing SDET discipline and define its charter. If you believe quality is engineered in, not inspected on, let's chat. As the SDET Manager for Mail & Messages Automated Testing Frameworks, you will lead a team of engineers dedicated to the testability, coverage, and reliability of two of the most important communication apps in the world, across every Apple platform. As an Apple manager you will stay hands-on — setting technical direction, going deep with your team on hard problems, and helping shape a discipline that is still being built. You will have real room to define the charter for how we test communication software at Apple. Your team's core is building and continuously optimizing the automated testing frameworks that power Mail and Messages — but the mandate is broader than framework code. You will drive testability upstream, partnering with product engineering to design test affordances and APIs directly into the apps (for example, in-product tooling that lets us forge and drive complex application state on demand) so that quality becomes something the products make easy to prove. You will shepherd the full lifecycle — authoring high-value automated tests, running them at scale, and triaging the results to catch regressions before customers ever feel them. Much of what makes this exciting is the distributed, multi-device nature of Mail and Messages: state that lives across devices, servers, and accounts, and the deep, genuinely novel challenge of testing it reliably. You will defend pass rates and reliability as first-class outcomes, turning flaky, hard-to-reproduce failures into trustworthy signal for the whole organization. You will partner with our Ops team on test infrastructure and CI, and with the product engineering, release quality, and product quality teams for Mail and Messages to raise the bar together. Above all, you will grow a diverse group of engineers and cultivate a quality culture — one where automation prevents bugs, feedback flows in every direction, and each person is supported toward their goals.

Requirements

Experience interviewing candidates and a track record of raising the bar on hiring.
Strong software engineering skills with a focus on test engineering.
Ability to act as an arbitrator for tough technical debates.
Clear, succinct, and effective communication and mediation skills.
Prioritize an inclusive quality culture where the best idea wins.
BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

Extensive experience with XCTest, XCUITest, and Swift.
Experience with different design paradigms for automated testing frameworks and understanding their trade-offs.
Experience testing complex, distributed, multi-device systems.
Experience building test affordances or APIs into a product to make it more testable.
Comfortable analyzing test results and quality signals at scale.

Responsibilities

Lead a team of engineers dedicated to the testability, coverage, and reliability of Mail and Messages apps.
Set technical direction and go deep with the team on hard problems.
Define the charter for testing communication software at Apple.
Build and continuously optimize automated testing frameworks for Mail and Messages.
Drive testability upstream by partnering with product engineering to design test affordances and APIs.
Author high-value automated tests, run them at scale, and triage results.
Defend pass rates and reliability as first-class outcomes.
Partner with Ops team on test infrastructure and CI.
Partner with product engineering, release quality, and product quality teams.
Grow a diverse group of engineers and cultivate a quality culture.