In this interview, we speak with Ishu Anand Jaiswal, a Senior Engineering Leader whose work has shaped large-scale, customer-facing systems at Apple, including global platforms used by millions. Drawing on more than 18 years of experience, Ishu reflects on the shift from building components to owning full systems with real business impact. The conversation explores what breaks at scale, how trust and reliability guide high-stakes decisions, and why AI demands stronger—not looser—human judgment.
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Over your 18+ year career, what was the point where your role shifted from building individual components to being responsible for full systems with real business and user impact?
From Building Software to Owning Outcomes
Early in my career, I believed that writing correct software was the main responsibility of an engineer. If the system worked in testing and met requirements, I felt confident moving on. That belief changed the first time I saw a small technical decision surface as a real problem for people far outside my immediate team, across regions and time zones, at a moment when there was no chance to roll it back quietly. Watching that happen made it clear that scale turns technical choices into lasting consequences. That realization has shaped how I think about systems and responsibility ever since.
In the early years of my career, much of my work was centered on building strong components. I focused on correctness, clean interfaces, and making sure individual pieces behaved as expected. That approach worked when my responsibility stopped at a module boundary.
The real shift came in 2014–2015, when I took on the role of Technology Lead and Architect for Apple Sales Web. For the first time, I was accountable for the system as a whole, including design decisions, reliability during launches, security controls, release readiness, and coordination across teams with different priorities and constraints.
That responsibility changed how I made decisions. I stopped asking whether a change was technically sound in isolation and started asking how it would behave globally. System health, failure modes, and business outcomes became the real measures of success.
You have led platforms used by millions across global organizations. Can you walk through one system you owned end to end, including its scale, usage, major risks, and outcomes?
Building Systems That Customers Actually See
That shift in responsibility became more visible in my work on Smart Sign, Apple’s in-store digital signage platform. The system was launched as part of the Apple Store’s tenth anniversary initiative and was designed to modernize the retail experience worldwide.
I led Smart Sign end-to-end, owning the platform design, content delivery model, rollout strategy, and reliability expectations. This was a customer-facing system where failures were immediately visible.
Smart Sign rolled out globally across roughly 25,000 demo endpoints and delivered content to around 20 million demo devices. Content refreshed frequently, close to real time, with an internal availability target of 99.999 percent. Traffic peaked sharply during major product launches.
Over time, Smart Sign became a core part of how Apple stores stayed current and consistent worldwide.
When working on that system, what were the hardest trade-offs you had to make under pressure, and what guided those decisions?
Choosing Trust Over Speed
With that visibility came constant pressure. Product launches had fixed dates, and the expectation to move fast was always present.
I had final responsibility for deciding whether updates were shipped or held back. Speed alone was never the deciding factor. Incorrect content or unstable behavior would have had an immediate impact across thousands of stores.
The signals guiding my decisions were error risk, blast radius, and customer trust. If a change increased uncertainty, it did not ship, even under schedule pressure.
That discipline prevented high-visibility failures during critical moments.
You have worked on platforms across global retail and education. What patterns did you see repeat as systems scaled, and where did early assumptions fail?
What Breaks When Systems Grow
What working in global retail and education taught me is that assumptions tend to break quickly when you scale.
Traffic does not grow smoothly. Usage spikes are sharper than expected. Content freshness matters more than predicted. Operational complexity grows faster than features.
My responsibility was to recognize where designs were starting to fail and adjust early, often by investing in resilience before growth forced the issue.
You have made original technical contributions, including patented designs. What problem triggered that work, and what changed as a result?
When Existing Solutions Stop Working
I encountered repeated failures in rule-based caching systems under burst traffic, especially during globally synchronized demand.
Rather than continuing to tune rules, I designed an adaptive caching approach driven by real demand signals. The goal was stability under real production conditions.
This work addressed failures observed at scale and resulted in a filed patent. In practice, it reduced cache misses during traffic bursts and improved system behavior.
AI is now part of many production systems. Can you describe a case where AI changed how a system behaved at scale?
Introducing AI Without Losing Control
As AI became part of production systems, I saw how quickly behavior could change at scale.
AI improved adaptability and efficiency, but also introduced new risks if left unchecked. I treated AI as a controlled component, enforcing guardrails, monitoring, and clear boundaries.
The result was measurable improvement without loss of control.
Privacy and trust are often discussed at a high level. What concrete design or governance choices did you personally enforce?
Making Trust a Design Constraint
I treated trust as a first-order design requirement. I enforced access boundaries, limited data exposure, and required explicit ownership for sensitive flows.
These controls were embedded directly into system design and applied to platforms serving millions of users and large financial volumes.
Trust was enforced by design, not policy.
As your teams became more distributed and senior, what leadership practices stopped working, and what replaced them?
Leading Without Micromanaging
As teams became more distributed and senior, practices that worked at a smaller scale stopped working. Close oversight and informal coordination quickly became sources of friction rather than clarity.
I was responsible for keeping delivery predictable without slowing teams down. The solution was not more control, but clearer ownership. I moved away from ad-hoc coordination toward explicit responsibilities, well-defined interfaces, and shared operational standards that teams could rely on independently.
This became even more important in my recent leadership role at Intuit, where teams were highly distributed and operating in complex, AI-influenced product environments. In that setting, predictability came from shared expectations and decision clarity, not proximity or constant synchronization.
By replacing micromanagement with ownership and standards, teams were able to move faster without losing accountability. Delivery became steadier, and escalation paths became the exception rather than the norm.
Beyond your company roles, you serve as a judge and reviewer. How has that influenced your own standards?
Learning From Evaluating Others’ Work
Serving as a judge and peer reviewer exposed me to a wide range of technical approaches.
Reviewing more than 100 papers sharpened my standards and made me less persuaded by solutions that failed under realistic constraints.
That perspective directly influences how I design systems.
You have received external recognition for your work. What was recognized, and why did that matter beyond personal achievement?
Why External Recognition Mattered
The recognition I received was tied to specific work, not role or tenure. Independent reviewers evaluated the systems I led and the technical approaches I introduced based on evidence of scale, originality, and real-world impact.
What mattered was how that evaluation was done. The reviewers were external to my organization and assessed the work without internal context or assumptions. The systems and decisions had to stand on their own, through documented outcomes, technical rigor, and behavior under real operating conditions.
That kind of review is uncommon in engineering, where success is often judged internally and relative to local constraints. In this case, the work would not have been recognized if it did not meet external standards for impact and sound engineering judgment.
For me, the value of that recognition was validation. It confirmed that the systems I built and the decisions I made were defensible beyond a single company or team, and that they would hold up under independent scrutiny. That standard continues to guide how I approach technical leadership.
Many leaders talk about influence, but impact is harder to prove. What is one example where your work continued to shape systems after you stepped away from direct ownership
Impact That Lasts Beyond Ownership
One of the clearest measures of impact for me is whether systems continue to operate predictably after direct ownership changes.
Across platforms I led, including Apple Sales Web, Smart Sign, and Apple Teacher, I focused on establishing clear architectural boundaries, operational standards, and ownership models that did not depend on individual decision-makers. My responsibility was not just to deliver the system, but to ensure it could be sustained by teams I would not always be part of.
After I stepped away from day-to-day ownership, these systems continued to serve large global user bases, handle peak demand reliably, and operate within the same governance and reliability expectations. The teams that inherited them did not require special context or ongoing escalation to keep them running.
That continuity is the strongest evidence that the work had a lasting impact. It shows that the systems and standards were designed to outlive any one leader and remain effective as organizations and teams evolved.
Looking ahead, what capabilities will senior engineering leaders need as AI becomes part of everyday technical and business decisions?
What the Next Generation of Leaders Will Need
As AI becomes routine, judgment becomes more important, not less. The real risk is not that AI systems will fail quietly, but that they will fail at scale in ways where responsibility becomes unclear.
I have seen that the hardest problems are no longer about whether a system can generate decisions, but about who owns the outcome when those decisions affect millions of users. AI accelerates results, but it also accelerates mistakes.
The role of a senior engineering leader is to define boundaries that AI cannot cross, enforce accountability when systems behave unexpectedly, and ensure that human judgment remains firmly in control. Tools can recommend. Models can predict. Responsibility still belongs to people.
This perspective has been reinforced in my recent work at Intuit, where AI is increasingly part of everyday engineering and product decisions, and where clarity of ownership matters as much as technical capability.
I recently summarized these operating principles in a public article on AI Frontier Network, where I described how AI should be managed as an accelerator of engineering judgment, not a replacement for it.
The leaders who remain effective will not be the ones who adopt AI the fastest, but the ones who stay clearly accountable for its behavior.
Selected Recognition:
International awards and peer recognition were evaluated by independent panels for original technical contributions, large-scale system impact, and applied AI leadership, along with best peer reviewer recognition at an international AI and security conference.
