Product Design Leader

Product Design Leader

We are looking for a Product Design leader to drive the creation of Apple's Home hardware products. You will own the end-to-end product development lifecycle for a portfolio of products spanning audio, visual, and sensing domains, each with distinct identities but designed to work together as a coherent system. You will build and lead a high-performing PD organization, set the technical direction for new product architectures, and partner deeply with Industrial Design, Hardware Engineering, Silicon, Software, and Operations to deliver world-class hardware on aggressive timelines.

You will lead Product Design for Apple's home hardware line, taking products from early architecture through mass production. This means owning mechanical architecture, system-level design, driving integration across electrical, thermal, acoustic, optical, and antenna domains, and ensuring products ship at Apple quality and scale.

Responsibilities:

• Building, mentoring, and organizing a product development team capable of executing across multiple concurrent programs in varying stages of maturity
• Driving product architecture decisions that account for system-level tradeoffs: cost structure, silicon capability, thermal envelope, acoustic performance, and sensor integration
• Owning the detailed engineering development process from concept through EVT/DVT/PVT and into sustained production
• Partnering with Industrial Design to converge on product forms that serve both user experience and engineering feasibility
• Working closely with Software, AI/ML, and platform teams to ensure hardware designs enable evolving software capabilities, not just point-in-time feature sets
• Collaborating with Operations and manufacturing partners to drive design-for-manufacturing excellence and resolve production challenges
• Contributing to multi-year product roadmap planning, including technology bets and platform decisions that span across the product line
• Communicating product development status, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to executive leadership
• This role requires comfort with ambiguity, the ability to hold both near-term execution rigor and long-term architectural thinking simultaneously, and strong instincts for when to push for elegance versus when to converge. You will operate across many organizations that don't share a single reporting structure, so influence, credibility, and genuine partnership matter as much as technical depth.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 10+ years experience in mechanical design, 8+ years in engineering management, preferably working experience in consumer electronics
• BS in Mechanical Engineering or related field
• Extensive experience in product development engineering, with significant time spent in engineering leadership roles, preferably in consumer electronics
• Track record of shipping high-volume, tightly integrated electromechanical products from concept through mass production
• Deep understanding of mechanical engineering fundamentals: materials, thermal management, structural analysis, tolerance systems, and manufacturing processes (injection molding, die casting, machining, stamping, extrusion, etc.)
• Strong design validation background: FEA, tolerance analysis, failure analysis, DOE, prototype-driven development
• Experience managing teams across multiple simultaneous programs at different lifecycle stages

Preferred Qualifications:

• MS or advanced degree in engineering
• Experience leading product development for products where acoustic, optical, or sensor performance is central to the user experience
• Demonstrated ability to drive system-level architecture decisions that span mechanical, electrical, thermal, and software domains
• Familiarity with cost-driven design tradeoffs at scale, including silicon and module selection, BOM optimization, and platform reuse strategies
• Experience building or restructuring product development organizations
• Track record of effective cross-functional leadership in environments where key partners sit outside your reporting chain

Pay & Benefits:

At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you…