Summary
The Operations Engineering Manager in Crypto Services leads a growing team responsible for the secure and reliable operation of critical technical infrastructure. This role is a blend of hands-on technical contribution (approximately 50%) and team leadership/management (approximately 50%). The manager will ensure operational excellence, drive incident management, and foster collaboration across SREs, PKI Engineers, and other technical teams, all while balancing strict application security and high availability requirements. This role will also play a key part in scaling the team and its processes globally.
Description
This role calls for a leader who isn't afraid to dive deep into technical challenges. You'll actively participate in troubleshooting complex issues, leveraging your expertise to guide the team through established procedures. Beyond immediate problem-solving, you'll oversee the documentation of critical problems, take charge of incident management from initial detection through to resolution, and ensure our team meticulously handles vital compliance tasks. Your hands-on involvement will be crucial in setting the technical direction and maintaining our high standards.
Responsibilities
- Guide, coach, and develop a high-performing team, fostering continuous improvement and technical excellence.
- Serve as a primary escalation point and incident commander during critical outages, driving swift resolution. Participate in on-call rotations to demonstrate hands-on leadership.
- Oversee and contribute to change management and secure code deployments using configuration management (e.g., Puppet, Chef, Ansible).
- Drive initiatives to measure, analyze, and optimize system performance, ensuring peak infrastructure efficiency through telemetry monitoring and alert response.
- Dedicate approximately 50% of your time to hands-on technical work, including architecture reviews, complex troubleshooting, and automation development.
- Build strong relationships and collaborate effectively with SREs, PKI Engineers, and other technical teams to ensure availability and reliability.
- Continuously refine operational processes, tooling, and documentation to enhance efficiency, security, and scalability.
- Set team priorities, manage workloads, and ensure consistent, high-quality results in a fast-paced environment.
Minimum Qualifications
- At least 5 years of hands-on experience in Operations Engineering, Systems Administration, or a similar technical role, with a robust background in Linux (any distribution, especially RHEL) and standard UNIX utilities.
- Demonstrated experience leading projects, mentoring junior engineers, or providing informal team leadership.
- Strong understanding of SRE principles and goals, coupled with prior on-call experience, including leading incident command and management efforts.
- Proficiency with configuration management tools (e.g., Puppet, Chef, Ansible) and scripting languages (e.g., Bash, Python).
- Experience with monitoring tools (e.g., Icinga/Nagios) and log aggregation platforms (e.g., Splunk).
- A proven track record of practical problem-solving, coupled with excellent communication and documentation skills, particularly in conveying complex technical information to diverse audiences.
Preferred Qualifications
- Direct experience managing a small team of engineers, including performance reviews, coaching, and supporting career development.
- Experience with distributed teams or managing operations across multiple time zones.
- Working knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS/GCP) and container orchestration technologies (Kubernetes).
- A deep understanding of security and compliance best practices, especially within a cryptographic or PKI environment.
- Experience supporting Java applications and/or managing critical hardware like Hardware Security Modules (HSMs).
Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. Apple provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities and in accordance with local requirements. Apple is a drug-free workplace.
