Senior Incident Manager

Are you energized by leading high-stakes operational response? Do you thrive in fast-moving, cross-functional environments where clarity and decisiveness directly protect the user experience? Are you the person others turn to in a crisis to bring order, drive resolution, and keep stakeholders informed? If so, you might be the right fit for a Senior Incident Manager role for Apple Wallet.

This role focuses on leading and improving the incident response program for Apple Wallet, ensuring that when issues arise, our response is fast, coordinated, and centered on the user experience. As a senior individual contributor, you'll set direction for incident management. It's a hands-on, high-accountability role that requires technical fluency, operational rigor, and strong leadership presence under pressure, with exceptional communication skills.

At Apple, we don't just build products - we craft the kind of wonder that's revolutionized entire industries. Apple Wallet has changed the way we access the world and is one of our fastest growing services. If this excites you, apply to join our talented team.

Description

As a Senior Incident Manager, you'll drive the incident management process end-to-end - ensuring it's executed consistently and accurately, while continuously improving it. You'll lead incident response, mobilize the right people quickly, and drive clear, decisive communication. Your technical fluency lets you follow the engineering conversation in real time, ask the sharper question, and translate complexity into clarity for stakeholders.

You'll also own the post-incident lifecycle - making sure every incident produces real learnings, durable observations, and clear ownership in partnership with Problem Management. Beyond execution, you'll continuously sharpen the practice itself: refining how we prioritize, communicate, respond, and surfacing cross-functional feedback on where we can be better. This role depends on strong written and verbal communication, sound judgment under pressure, and a teamwork-first instinct.

Responsibilities:

Serve as Incident Commander on high-severity events, owning the response from declaration through mitigation, driving cadence, and removing blockers.

Make timely, well-reasoned decisions under pressure, including escalations, when to engage additional teams, and when to communicate externally.

Own incident communications throughout the lifecycle - delivering concise, accurate updates to engineering, leadership, partners, and stakeholders.

Set direction for and coach a team of incident managers, driving consistent execution, quality, and continuous improvement across the team.

Maintain a clear incident record - timeline, key decisions, actions taken, and impact assessment - so post-incident work starts from a strong foundation.

Lead post-incident reviews that focus on systemic learning, ensuring every incident produces durable observations, clear action items, and named owners.

Partner closely with Problem Management to translate post-incident learnings into prevention work.

Continuously improve response playbooks, and escalation paths.

Build strong working relationships across Engineering, Operations, and external partners.

Identify and surface cross-functional gaps - process, tooling, ownership, observability - and drive them to resolution.

Preferred Qualifications

Hands-on engineering background (SRE, DevOps, or software engineering), particularly in payments or financial services.

Experience leading incident programs across global teams or regulated environments.

Background in high-availability systems, payments infrastructure, or customer-critical services.

Experience integrating incident workflows with observability platforms (e.g., Datadog).

Experience driving change in cross-functional or matrixed organizations.

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Information Technology or equivalent practical experience.

6+ years of experience in incident management, site reliability engineering, or technical program management for production services.

Demonstrated experience building or scaling an incident management program in a production or customer-facing environment.

Proven ability to define, measure, and influence operational metrics (MTTD, MTTR, etc.).

Experience facilitating postmortems and applying root cause analysis frameworks to drive durable improvements.

Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, particularly with engineering, product, and executive stakeholders.

Excellent communication skills under pressure, with the ability to drive clarity and urgency.

Experience with incident tooling (e.g., PagerDuty, Slack automation, observability platforms).