Sr. Software Engineering Manager, Foundation - Wallet, Payments & Commerce

At Apple, great ideas become products that touch the lives of billions. Wallet, Payments & Commerce 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 financial services. If you are a seasoned engineering leader who thrives at the intersection of deep technical complexity and people development, this is your opportunity to do the most impactful work of your career.

The Foundation organization within Wallet, Payments & Commerce (WPC) builds the developer platform and server-side capabilities that power all WPC products and services. We are looking for an experienced, high-impact Senior Software Engineering Manager to lead a team of engineering managers and software engineers with full end-to-end production ownership across a portfolio of core capabilities.

As a Senior Software Engineering Manager in the Foundation organization, you will manage a team of engineering managers and software engineers responsible for the technical direction, architecture, delivery, and ongoing operation of critical services supporting foundational domain capabilities used across all WPC products.

This role demands both technical depth and leadership maturity. You will partner with your managers and senior engineers on system design and technical strategy, ensuring your services meet the high bar for scale, reliability, and security expected of Apple's financial and commerce systems. You will maintain active technical credibility across your team's systems, evaluating architectural trade-offs, participating in design reviews, identifying technical risks, and guiding delivery from concept to production.

As a people leader, you will mentor and grow the engineering managers and software engineers on your team, support their career development, and foster a culture grounded in accountability, collaboration, and delivery excellence.

Responsibilities

• Team Leadership & Manager Development: Lead and develop a team of engineering managers and software engineers. Coach your managers on effective people leadership, career development, and hiring, while creating opportunities for engineers to expand their scope and impact.
• Delivery & Roadmap Ownership: Own end-to-end delivery from scoping through production rollout. Make sound decisions in ambiguous situations, communicate rationale transparently, and keep cross-functional partners proactively informed.
• Technical Strategy & Architecture: Guide the technical direction and architecture for services supporting your portfolio of capabilities. Partner with senior engineers on architecture decisions, evaluate complex trade-offs, and ensure designs deliver durable outcomes at scale.
• Technical Credibility & Design Governance: Maintain deep technical engagement across your team's codebase and architectures, facilitating rigorous design reviews, identifying technical risks, and upholding high standards for code quality and maintainability.
• Cross-Functional Partnership & Influence: Build trusted relationships and drive alignment across Product, Compliance, Privacy, Program Management, and peer Engineering teams across WPC and Apple Services.
• Operational Excellence: Improve and maintain standards for operational health, including 24/7 on-call processes, incident response, capacity planning, and long-term system maintainability.
• Culture of Quality: Champion a culture of quality, psychological safety, continuous improvement, and shared accountability through retrospectives, structured feedback, and investment in engineering practices that raise the bar.

Minimum Qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering experience and 8+ years of direct engineering management including experience leading engineering managers and developing senior individual contributors.
• Strong production experience with JVM-based languages, microservices architectures, and high-availability server-side services.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals, including SQL and NoSQL data stores, consistency models, and multi-region deployment topologies such as active-active and active-passive.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical design and architecture reviews, evaluate complex trade-offs, identify technical risks, and drive operational excellence including on-call culture and incident management.
• Strong decision-making and communication skills in ambiguous environments, with the ability to deliver structured feedback, communicate strategy clearly, and build trust with cross-functional partners across organizational boundaries.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Domain experience in payments, commerce, or financial services, including familiarity with compliance, privacy, and security considerations.
• Demonstrated track record of developing talent, growing individual contributors into senior roles, and coaching engineering managers to scale their leadership.
• Experience with re-platforming, modularizing, or scaling backend systems, and navigating cross-functional alignment across distributed and cross-timezone teams.
• Master's degree is a plus but not required.