Sr. Software Engineering Manager, Solr Search - Apple Service Engineering

Engineering Leader For Solr Team

Apple's Solr team builds and operates large-scale Apache Solr deployments that power search across many of Apple's most essential internet services, including iCloud, Music, TV, and Maps. The platform is foundational to the search experience at Apple, and your work will directly shape products used by hundreds of millions of people. We are seeking a seasoned engineering leader to guide an established team of Solr experts and drive the evolution of Apple's search infrastructure.

In this role, you will lead a team responsible for delivering a high-performance, scalable, and reliable Solr platform that meets Apple's rapidly evolving product needs. The team owns both the operation of Apple-scale Solr clusters and contributions to Solr open source, client libraries, and the surrounding control plane. You will define technical direction, uphold engineering rigor, and ensure operational excellence across the Solr ecosystem. You will hire, mentor, and grow engineers working on internal platform capabilities as well as upstream open-source efforts. Close collaboration with SRE, EPM, and product teams is essential to align platform strategy, drive clarity, and support customer-facing initiatives.

You are someone who:

• Holds a high bar for quality and engineering excellence
• Leads with clarity, empathy, and accountability
• Can dive deep into technical and operational details when needed
• Challenges assumptions constructively and brings structure to ambiguity
• Builds strong partnerships across organizations

Minimum qualifications:

• 5+ years of people-management experience leading and developing engineering teams, including managing managers
• Demonstrated success building and scaling platform or infrastructure teams
• Deep expertise in Solr, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or Lucene
• Strong technical leadership driving complex, cross-functional projects
• Extensive software development experience with a solid understanding of distributed systems (consensus, consistency, fault tolerance)
• Advanced knowledge of algorithms, data structures, and performance considerations for large-scale search platforms
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Preferred qualifications:

• Deep familiarity with Kafka as part of large-scale distributed systems, with the ability to guide design decisions, optimize throughput, and ensure resilient data flow across services
• Experience with compute/container platforms (e.g., Kubernetes)
• Experience contributing to open-source projects, ideally Apache Solr or related ecosystems
• Hands-on experience with vector search

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics.