Senior Incident Manager

Apple Apple · Big Tech · Austin, TX +2 · Software and Services

Senior Incident Manager for Apple Wallet, focusing on leading and improving the incident response program, ensuring fast, coordinated, and user-centric responses to issues. Requires technical fluency, operational rigor, and strong leadership under pressure.

What you'd actually do

  1. Serve as Incident Commander on high-severity events, owning the response from declaration through mitigation, driving cadence, and removing blockers.
  2. Make timely, well-reasoned decisions under pressure, including escalations, when to engage additional teams, and when to communicate externally.
  3. Own incident communications throughout the lifecycle - delivering concise, accurate updates to engineering, leadership, partners, and stakeholders.
  4. Set direction for and coach a team of incident managers, driving consistent execution, quality, and continuous improvement across the team.
  5. Maintain a clear incident record - timeline, key decisions, actions taken, and impact assessment - so post-incident work starts from a strong foundation.

Skills

Required

  • incident management
  • site reliability engineering
  • technical program management
  • production services
  • building or scaling an incident management program
  • production or customer-facing environment
  • define, measure, and influence operational metrics (MTTD, MTTR, etc.)
  • facilitating postmortems
  • applying root cause analysis frameworks
  • cross-functional collaboration
  • communication skills under pressure
  • incident tooling (e.g., PagerDuty, Slack automation, observability platforms)

Nice to have

  • Hands-on engineering background (SRE, DevOps, or software engineering)
  • payments or financial services
  • leading incident programs across global teams or regulated environments
  • high-availability systems
  • payments infrastructure
  • customer-critical services
  • integrating incident workflows with observability platforms (e.g., Datadog)
  • driving change in cross-functional or matrixed organizations

What the JD emphasized

  • technical fluency
  • operational rigor
  • strong leadership presence under pressure
  • exceptional communication skills
  • hands-on, high-accountability role
  • drive resolution
  • clarity and decisiveness
  • user experience
  • technical fluency
  • sharper question
  • translate complexity into clarity
  • post-incident lifecycle
  • real learnings
  • durable observations
  • clear ownership
  • Problem Management
  • continuously sharpen the practice
  • prioritize
  • communicate
  • respond
  • surfacing cross-functional feedback
  • strong written and verbal communication
  • sound judgment under pressure
  • teamwork-first instinct
  • high-severity events
  • incident communications
  • incident record
  • post-incident reviews
  • systemic learning
  • action items
  • named owners
  • Problem Management
  • prevention work
  • response playbooks
  • escalation paths
  • cross-functional gaps
  • process
  • tooling
  • ownership
  • observability
  • drive them to resolution
  • incident management
  • site reliability engineering
  • technical program management
  • production services
  • building or scaling an incident management program
  • production or customer-facing environment
  • operational metrics
  • postmortems
  • root cause analysis frameworks
  • durable improvements
  • cross-functional collaboration
  • engineering
  • product
  • executive stakeholders
  • communication skills under pressure
  • clarity and urgency
  • incident tooling
  • PagerDuty
  • Slack automation
  • observability platforms
  • engineering background
  • SRE
  • DevOps
  • software engineering
  • payments
  • financial services
  • incident programs
  • global teams
  • regulated environments
  • high-availability systems
  • payments infrastructure
  • customer-critical services
  • incident workflows
  • observability platforms
  • Datadog
  • change in cross-functional or matrixed organizations