Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Knowledge Platform

Apple is where individual imaginations come together, committing to the values

that lead to great work. Every new product we build, service we create, or Apple

Store experience we deliver is the result of us strengthening each other’s

ideas. That happens because every one of us believes that we can make something

wonderful and share it with the world, changing lives for the better! Here,

you’ll do more than join something — you’ll add something. The Information

Intelligence team is redefining how billions of people use their devices to get

information. We are an Applied ML team pushing the limits of question answering,

assistant response ranking, and search technologies, while also responsible for

a production service. We are part of a wider effort to power information across

a variety of Apple products – including Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Messages,

Lookup, and more. As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you play a critical role

in developing world-class Search and Q&A experiences for Apple customers with

cutting-edge search technologies and large language models.

DESCRIPTION

As a member of our fast-paced group, you’ll have the unique and rewarding

opportunity to shape upcoming products from Apple. Our team includes a diversity

of backgrounds from applied scientists with a focus in NLP to experienced

distributed systems engineers. As such, we are looking for candidates with

in-depth understanding of machine learning fundamentals, applied machine

learning experience, and strong software engineering skills. Our team is

responsible for delivering next-generation Search and Question Answering systems

across Apple products including Siri, Safari, Spotlight, and more. This is your

chance to shape how people get information by leveraging your Search and applied

machine learning expertise along with robust software engineering skills. You

will collaborate with outstanding Search and AI engineers on large scale machine

learning to improve Query Understanding, Retrieval, and Ranking, developing

fundamental building blocks needed for AI powered experiences such as

fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. This involves pushing the boundaries on

document retrieval and ranking, developing sophisticated machine learning

models, using embeddings and deep learning to understand the quality of matches.

It also includes online learning to react quickly to change and natural language

processing to understand queries. You will work with petabytes of data and

combine information from multiple structured and unstructured sources to provide

the best results and accurate answers to satisfy users' information-seeking

needs. As part of our team, you will be leveraging and improving upon the latest

deep learning techniques, such as LLM and RAG, in order to understand queries

and user intents, rank documents, and find useful answers to users’ questions.

Our team is responsible for training, fine-tuning and deploying these models at

scale, using the latest advances for online inference optimization. Following is

the primary list of responsibilities for an ML engineer in the team:

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

MS in Computer Science or related field 10+ years of work experience in machine

learning, deep learning or related field 10+ years experience in shipping Search

and Q&A technologies and ML systems Excellent programming skills in mainstream

programming languages such as C++, Python, Scala, and Go Experience delivering

tooling and frameworks to evaluate individual components and end-to-end quality

Strong analytical skills to systematically identify opportunities to improve

search relevance and answer accuracy Strong written and verbal communication

with the ability to articulate complex topics Excellent interpersonal skills and

teamwork; demonstrated ability to connect and collaborate with others Passion

for building phenomenal products and curiosity to learn

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Information

Retrieval, Data Science or related field Strong industry background and

experience in search and related technologies (LLMs, Machine Learning, NLP,

Information Retrieval, Question Answering) Strong and validated experience of ML

development and production systems Experience working with foundation models and

LLMs