Staff/Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Knowledge Platforms

The AI, Search & Knowledge Platforms team builds amazing products and services

for Apple's customers while serving as a foundational partner to teams across

Apple. The team delivers world-class AI, search, and knowledge systems powering

Siri, Apple Intelligence, Safari, and iMessage, and operates the foundational

platforms and infrastructure that keep these intelligent experiences running at

hyperscale. As part of this group, you will focus on identifying and addressing

opportunities to improve the quality and performance of the search and ranking

stack that powers world knowledge question answering. This involves developing

sophisticated machine learning systems, robust software heuristics, and large

language models (LLMs) to understand user queries, retrieve and rank relevant

documents, and provide users with direct answers that best satisfy their intent.

You will work across the entire stack, applying a broad skill set that ranges

from data science and opportunity analysis to ML system design, pipeline

development, and quality evaluation.

DESCRIPTION

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

opportunity to shape upcoming products from Apple. We are looking for a highly

motivated and versatile Machine Learning and Software Engineer with a broad

skill set. The ideal candidate combines strong engineering fundamentals with a

keen product sense, and is a quick learner who is comfortable jumping into

entirely new codebases and architectures. You must be an effective communicator

and an adaptable problem solver, willing to take on whatever represents the

optimal solution for the product, whether that means training machine learning

models, writing robust software heuristics, or iterating on prompt engineering.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

Bachelor’s in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a

related field. 6+ years experience in shipping Search and ML systems Strong

programming skills in Python, Go or similar languages, with a solid foundation

in software design, data structures, and algorithms. Experience building

scalable data pipelines and backend systems, coupled with the ability to quickly

navigate and contribute to large, complex, and unfamiliar codebases. Proficiency

in data science methodologies, including A/B testing, statistical hypothesis

testing and defining offline and online evaluation metrics for ML systems.

Experience with prompt engineering Strong product sense with the ability to

translate ambiguous product requirements into concrete engineering and modeling

tasks. Excellent communication skills, with the ability to back up decisions

with rigorous data analysis and present findings clearly to cross-functional

partners.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

Master’s/Ph.D in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or

a related field. 4+ years experience in shipping Search and ML systems Hands-on

experience in Information Retrieval, Search Ranking, or Natural Language

Processing (NLP). Demonstrated experience designing, building, or working with

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures and applications. Familiarity

with techniques for optimizing the inference performance, latency, and resource

efficiency of LLMs and large machine learning systems in production environments

(e.g., model quantization, caching, distributed inference). Experience with

training and deploying machine learning models