Apple seeks senior executive VP of virtual farming relations

Well, not exactly, but the company did post a job listing late last week for Worldwide Developer Relations – Partnership Manager, Casual Games and Social Networking segment. It’s a good sign that Apple is embracing the ridiculously popular social gaming industry—which includes popular titles such as FarmVille, Family Feud and other things my wife describes to me when I’m paying attention to something else,—but where’s the job listing for Partnership Manager, Hardcore Games?

Anyway, Apple describes the position thus:

Apple is looking for a dynamic, highly motivated individual to join the Worldwide Developer Relations Partnership Management team. This individual will be responsible for building and maintaining relationships with new and existing software developers, to promote application development, and to continue the delivery of world-class solutions and content on Apple devices.

Sadly, having all kinds of Facebook friends helping you with Mafia Wars likely won’t be enough to land the job. Being accurately described by popular (but fairly meaningless) business adjectives such as “dynamic,” “motivated,” “aggressive,” “self-directed” and “persuasive” will help, but not as much as a BS/BA degree (MS/MA/MBA or equivalent preferred), and a knowledge of mobile application development, developer support programs, and related marketing activities.

To those of us not interested in moving to Cupertino for work, the relevant aspect of the job is this bullet point from the list of what the qualified candidate will do:

• Promote the adoption of the iPhone, iPad and Mac OS X SDKs and other development tools to 3rd party application developers.

In other words, FarmVille without the need for Flash, please. It’s all well and good on the Mac, but the FarmVille by Zynga app is not going over well on the iPhone, and isn’t on the iPad at all. I know a good number of iPad uses who’d love to be able to log into their Facebook account and play the numerous social networking games available right from within Mobile Safari, and it appears Apple does, too.

Learn more about the job (and apply, if you like) at CareerBuilder.com.