The job could be one of the most high stress positions at Apple. According to the description, “The candidate will be responsible for overseeing the protection of, and managing risks to, Apple’s unreleased products and related intellectual property. The individual will collaborate with other security managers by contributing to, and managing execution of, strategic initiatives set forth by Director, Global Security.”
If that doesn’t scare you off, the company said that the ideal candidate will have a “proven record” of, “Simultaneously working with multiple constituencies, balancing disparate priorities, problem solving in high-demand situations, defining and establishing attainable measures of success, and regularly achieving positive outcomes in large-scale business environments.”
Apple would also prefer an “advanced degree,” such as an M.S. in Risk Management, Information Assurance, Security Management, or the like. There’s also an alphabet soup of various certifications needed, and you’ll also want to show five or more years of working experience in the field.
Those are some stiff requirements, all in all, and Apple’s potential pool of candidates is likely to be on the elite side. Few companies take product secrecy as seriously as Apple, limiting the number of people who will have experience in this area. Potential candidates might come from the pharmaceutical world, for instance, as well as the defense industry.
On the one hand, that’s a measure of how seriously the company is taking the dual demands of protecting product development and the need for in-the-field testing, especially with its mobile devices. On the other hand, it is, perhaps, surprising that Apple doesn’t already have such positions.
That said, we have no indication whether these are new jobs or new vacancies for existing jobs. As noted above, Apple takes product security seriously, but it’s also easy to forget that Apple’s growth has been on a very sharp incline for only a few years, and there are many aspects of being a $100 billion per year company that are entirely new to Apple.
For instance, last week it was revealed that Apple only brought on a security team to tackle Chinese counterfeits in 2008, two years after the iPhone was released and several years after the iPod became a huge hit.
PC Magazine first noticed the job postings over the holiday weekend.