SDET Manager, Mail & Messages Automated Testing Frameworks

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.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a diverse group of engineers to improve the testability and test coverage of the Mail and Messages applications across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and visionOS.
• Own the design, build-out, and ongoing optimization of the automated testing frameworks that power Mail and Messages quality — the heart of your team's charter.
• Drive testability upstream by partnering with product engineering to build test affordances and APIs directly into the apps, enabling us to create and control complex app state on demand.
• Shepherd the full test lifecycle: authoring high-value automated tests, running them at scale, and triaging results to identify regressions early.
• Defend pass rates and reliability across a distributed, multi-device system, converting nondeterministic failures into signal the organization can trust.
• Partner with the Ops team on test infrastructure and CI, and with the release quality and product quality teams for Mail and Messages.
• Invent new strategies and hooks for testing complex, popular, real-time communication apps, and expand coverage to defend their quality and reliability.
• Cultivate a quality culture where feedback is welcomed and given openly, and where engineers are supported in reaching their goals.

Minimum Qualifications

• You care about supporting others and growing their careers.
• You have experience interviewing candidates and a track record of raising the bar on hiring.
• You have strong software engineering skills with a focus on test engineering, and can act as an arbitrator for tough technical debates.
• You communicate — and mediate communication — clearly, succinctly, and effectively.
• You prioritize an inclusive quality culture where the best idea wins, no matter who it comes from.
• You have a BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Extensive experience with XCTest, XCUITest, and Swift.
• You have worked across different design paradigms for automated testing frameworks and understand their trade-offs.
• You have experience testing complex, distributed, multi-device systems.
• You have driven a team — or led as a senior individual contributor — toward a successful, durable testing philosophy.
• You have experience building test affordances or APIs into a product to make it more testable.
• You are comfortable analyzing test results and quality signals at scale