ASE - Engineering Program Manager, Search and Answer Relevance

Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, new ideas have a way of becoming extraordinary products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. And we actively leverage the latest breaking technologies for opportunities to delight our users in their daily lives. Do you love taking on challenges that create a positive impact? Are you passionate about empowering many ground-breaking intelligent experiences to be made? The Apple AIML org is building groundbreaking technology...and we are looking for people like you!

We’re looking for a Engineering Program Manager with a strong track record of delivering search products and world knowledge answering features using disruptive technologies upon aggressive timeline. The program manager will lead a large cross functional project to help improve Apple’s over 1 billion customers experience. The role will work with world level deep learning and AI engineers applying cutting edge AI technologies including Large Language Models to enable exciting new user experiences and continue improving relevance metrics and quality for shipped features.

As an Engineering Program Manager, you’ll sit at the center of complex, high-impact initiatives uniting cross-functional teams around a shared vision and turning ambitious ideas into clear, executable plans. You’ll influence decisions, manage schedules, dependencies, risks, and critical paths, and provide senior leaders with timely, objective insight into program health. By combining quantitative data, qualitative feedback, and internal dogfooding, you’ll advocate for exceptional relevance, quality, and user experience while helping teams continuously improve how they operate and deliver. For Search Experimentation, you’ll also lead experiment prioritization, manage testing budgets, and drive executive ship-room discussions that shape critical product-launch decisions.

Responsibilities

• Drive consensus across multiple groups with varying opinions & needs. Influence entire teams around a common purpose and drive conference on the plan of execution
• Create and manage project schedules with clear dependencies, critical path and systematic methodology to communicate status
• Proactively identify and manage risks, close gaps and and re-plan as needed
• Keep teams on critical path with efforts to minimize distractions
• Provide clear, timely and objective communication, including regular program status updates and one-off reviews as needed to executive team
• Keep an eye on any potential gaps across dependency teams and proactively promote regular communications on common source of truth
• Proactive and regular insurance of alignments across all stake holder teams when new factors arise
• Lead measurements to help team understand and measure success, including relevance, quality, usage scale and other key KPIs
• Advocate for user and company values when leading team to convergence on key open questions
• Lead early feedback collection from internal dogfooding during feature convergence, drive team to address feedback in feature iterations
• Advocate for relevance, quality and user experience, using both quantitative and qualitative data
• Reflect on how the team operates, proactively propose and implement new ways to enable more effective processes & delivery of results

Minimum Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in driving large scale program building machine learning powered products
• Strong ability to deal with ambiguities, drive disambiguation and clarities, shepherd multiple teams to meet aggressive timeline
• Excellent program management skills including program structuring and managing multiple work streams interdependently
• Solid knowledge of technical system architecture and systems design tradeoffs
• Strong problem-solving skills with attention to details
• Strategic and results driven mindset focusing on driving what matters
• Self-motivated and proactive, with demonstrated creative and critical thinking capabilities required to forge a path to success
• Strong leadership skills, including conflict resolution, negotiation, courage to take risks when needed
• Strong ability to communicate abstract ideas clearly, manage comprehensive yet succinct project status update to all levels of audience, both verbally and in written forms
• Bachelors in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning or related field or equivalent work experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in delivery search and generative answer relevance metrics and quality improvements in large scale products.
• Experience orchestrating the delivery of multiple significant client/server software products requiring large organizations (100+) across teams to execute
• Strong adaptability and agility in making adjustments to project strategy and plan with evolving situations
• Computer Science postgraduate degrees or MBA