Sr Manager - Infrastructure, SRE, & AI Platforms - Services Special Projects

Apple•Cupertino, CA

About The Position

We are looking to hire a Senior Infrastructure, SRE & AI Platforms Manager to help set the long-term technical strategy, organizational structure, and operational roadmap for global, mission-critical infrastructure platforms on the Services Special Projects team. This position requires a rare blend of deep technical domain expertise—spanning distributed systems, Kubernetes, and AI workload orchestration—and proven organizational leadership managing large, globally distributed engineering teams. In this role, you will be responsible for defining and building infrastructure strategy that balances continuous innovation with high reliability, performance, and cost efficiency. You will lead a growing, multi-tiered team of engineers who are responsible for foundational platforms that power large-scale consumer and enterprise workloads. Beyond operational delivery, you will establish standards for operational excellence, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and capacity planning. You will be a key strategic partner, translating complex business imperatives into scalable platform designs while cultivating a strong engineering culture focused on automation, technical ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Requirements

MS Degree in Computer Science or related degree and 12+ years of experience of progressive engineering leadership experience building, scaling, and operating mission-critical infrastructure platforms and global services.
6+ years managing multi-layered engineering organizations (manager-of-managers) with a proven track record of hiring, developing, and retaining top-tier technical talent across global sites.
Demonstrated hands-on and architectural mastery of cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes platform engineering, and hybrid cloud operations (AWS, GCP, private data centers).
Direct operational and architectural experience running large-scale systems for AI/ML training and inference workloads, including utilization optimization, scheduling, and high-performance storage/networking.
Deep background in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, telemetry, observability frameworks, disaster recovery, and managing 24/7 high-availability infrastructure at scale.
Exceptional ability to seamlessly bridge executive strategy and low-level technical trade-offs—communicating vision to executive stakeholders while driving detailed technical discussions with principal engineers.
Experience leading core infrastructure or foundational platform SRE for a global, tier-1 technology organization operating at massive scale.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity overseeing diverse open-source and proprietary storage/data ecosystems (e.g., Cassandra, FoundationDB, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL).
Proven competency managing large-scale infrastructure investments, capital expenditures, operational budgets, capacity forecasting, and cloud optimization strategies.

Responsibilities

Define and execute the long-term technical vision and capital investment strategy for global compute, storage, network, observability, and AI infrastructure.
Partner with Leadership to align platform capabilities, risk management, capacity investments, and architectural decisions with overarching business goals.
Evaluate emerging infrastructure technologies, and make strategic platform trade-off decisions.
Architect, scale, and optimize large-scale environments for training and inference, resolving complex challenges in cluster design, scheduling, interconnect performance, storage throughput, and capacity planning.
Oversee internal Kubernetes compute environments as well as managed public cloud platforms (AWS EKS, GCP GKE) and large bare-metal footprints to provide seamless developer experiences.
Direct the strategy and maintenance for distributed block/object storage alongside managed database and data streaming platforms (e.g., Cassandra, FoundationDB, Redis, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Kafka).
Ensure reliable global traffic management, load balancing, cloud networking architectures, and enterprise security compliance across all environments.
Cultivate a mature SRE culture focusing on high availability, automated fault recovery, telemetry, logging, metrics, and rigorous post-incident analysis.
Build, mentor, and lead a globally distributed organization comprising engineers, managers, and managers-of-managers across all levels (interns through senior principal staff).
Establish an environment characterized by strong technical ownership, clear accountability, continuous operational refinement, and aggressive automation of manual processes.
Manage large-scale infrastructure investments, capital expenditures, operational budgets, capacity forecasting, and cloud optimization strategies.