Software Development Engineer in Test - Manager

Summary

Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, new ideas have a way of becoming outstanding products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. Bring passion and dedication to your job, and there's no telling what you could accomplish.

Apple’s Sales organization generates the revenue needed to fuel our ongoing development of products and services. This, in turn, enriches the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world. We are, in many ways, the face of Apple to our largest customers.

We’re looking for a talented individual who is passionate about crafting, implementing, and operating AI solutions that have a direct and measurable impact on Apple Sales and its customers.

We’re seeking a visionary Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)/QE Engineering Manager to own and test end-to-end application workflows using AI. This role will focus on implementing and maintaining QE frameworks, instrumentation, and workflows that help us understand how well our applications perform, where they fail, and how they improve over time.

This role will operate in both capacities, to augment existing AI roadmap, as well as innovate and trailblazing new frontier tech projects, crafting AI experiences that reduce time to insights and catalyze decision making.

Description

As a QE manager, you will build and lead a team of engineers as a part of a global horizontal Quality Engineering group focused on a breadth of technologies and applications including very highly scalable distributed applications, No-SQL platforms, internal search platforms, end customer facing websites and services, critical security systems, machine learning and anomaly detection systems, software-load balancing, among others.

Build, develop, innovate, and retain a hard-working team of quality engineers and build an environment where they can thrive and succeed. Act as a role model for your team when it comes to getting things done and exceeding expectations.

Your skills in relationship management and partnership should be outstanding as this role requires to quickly understand and respond to peer teams’ needs and work with management and engineering leadership, developers, quality engineers, project managers, and multi-functional teams who take ownership in building outstanding scalable solutions. You will work in a fast-paced software development environment and continuously enhance our automation infrastructure to move towards continuous deployment where every code change is thoroughly tested and considered ready to be deployed.

You will be the quality DRI on product features. To be successful, you will need to supervise and communicate release readiness, identify any gaps, and consistently assess new and innovative ways to improve automation solutions. While the primary role is leading/managing employees, you should have deep technical knowledge of distributed systems and cloud computing, platform as a service, and microservices architecture. We expect that you have strong experience working with short release cycles, do not hesitate to code, and actively participate in design and code reviews.

Responsibilities

• Design robust test plans with a broad system understanding and in close collaboration with development and product management.
• Own regression testing for the Agile releases — defining and executing the regression suite needed before each release ships.
• Sign off on quality at go/no-go, acting as the final quality gate before release.
• Triage the Ready-for-Release defect queue, prioritizing and driving defects to closure ahead of each release.
• Test management: Manage a single place where test cases live, maintaining it as the one source of truth for the team's test coverage.
• Communicate status and quality metrics to all project status stakeholders in a timely manner. Drive issue resolution.
• Refine and expand existing test automation infrastructure and strategies with a focus on configurability, scalability, low complexity and reuse.
• Define automation best practices for the team and mentor junior team members on automation techniques and technology. Perform peer code reviews.
• Champion best software testing practices within the team and evangelise software development practices that improve software quality across the organisation.
• Be hands-on: participate in various testing activities, including manual testing, automating test cases, and troubleshooting issues.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years in Quality roles testing and automating large scale customer-facing systems with sophisticated distributed integrations
• 3+ years managing quality engineers responsible for qualifying features through the complete software development life cycle
• Ability to act as a leader to increase efficiency through process improvements and automation, increase test coverage through automation, reduce customer-impacting defects, make informed risk-based decisions, and improve chances of success and promote software testing standards and mentor engineers in the team
• Ability to build, drive and support automation test strategy. Dedication to delivering great software and releasing it quickly, efficiently, and with growing quality. (white box + black box, automation, functional, performance, stress testing)
• Excellent knowledge of QE automation architecture, methodologies, processes, and tools.
• Hands on in automating functional, system and integration tests. Experience in tools like Playwright, Selenium WebDriver, Cucumber-JVM, Appium for API, Web, iOS and MacOS platforms.
• Experience creating multiple test frameworks from scratch. Experience in Java or Python, familiar with databases, SQL, and scripting languages.
• Understanding of REST and RESTful services.
• Applied knowledge of GenAI, micro-services, recommendation systems, and context engineering.
• Familiarity with AI evaluation concepts such as Golden datasets, LLM-as-judge and experience with different LLM ecosystems (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc.)
• Experience with CI/CD or release validation workflows, deployment process and code quality checking tools.
• Knowledge of project management, and productivity tools such as Wrike and Miro.
• Strong time management skills with the ability to collaborate across multiple teams.
• Able to balance competing priorities, long-term projects, and ad hoc requirements.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, dynamic, constantly evolving business environment.
• Working across global teams to ensure alignment of product development.
• We're looking for someone with an eagerness and ability to learn new skills and solve dynamic problems in an encouraging and expansive environment.
• Ability to collaborate and influence multi-functional teams within your area of responsibility.
• Excellent interpersonal communication skills, both verbal and written.
• Collaborate with multi-functional and globally distributed teams

Preferred Qualifications

• Highly organised, creative, motivated, and passionate about achieving results.
• Creative thinker and strong problem solver with meticulous attention to detail.
• Experience working in Unix/Linux environments
• An enthusiasm for user-focused design & high-quality products.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills to facilitate close interaction with development teams, management, and other teams within Apple