Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Apple Cloud AI

Summary

Apple is a place where extraordinary people gather to do their best work. Together we build products and experiences people love. The Apple Services Engineering (ASE) organization builds and operates the systems and infrastructure that power Apple's services at scale.

The Apple AI platform within ASE enables teams across Apple to build, train, optimize, and deploy AI systems at scale. Our team builds the optimization and intelligence layer for frontier AI, making frontier class of models work better, cheaper, and faster through managed, serverless capabilities that span the full AI lifecycle: data and feature engineering, embeddings and retrieval, model training and fine-tuning, inference optimization and routing, prompt optimization, evaluation, and governance.

Description

We are looking for an ML engineer who is excited about building managed platform services at the intersection of ML, distributed systems, and production engineering.

Responsibilities

As a member of the team, your responsibilities will include:

Design, build, and optimize large-scale ML platform services used by teams across Apple
Build the embedding and retrieval path end to end - fine-tuning encoder models, encoding corpora at scale, building and serving vector indexes, and evaluating retrieval quality so improvements are measurable rather than asserted
Build and operate the feature store teams use for training and serving, keeping both paths consistent off a single feature definition
Develop optimization capabilities that reduce cost and improve quality across ML workloads - including model routing, caching, serving configuration, inference optimization, and training efficiency
Build managed, self-service experiences so customers can go from data to production AI with minimal friction
Build managed training - supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning and distillation - so teams can customize models without running their own training infrastructure
Build governance and compliance capabilities - lineage, policy enforcement, cost observability, and access control
Partner with customer teams across Apple to understand their ML workloads and deliver production solutions
Operate production services with on-call responsibilities

Minimum Qualifications

3+ years of experience building production ML systems or ML infrastructure
Strong programming skills in Python and/or Rust/Java
Understanding of end-to-end machine learning workflows - from data preparation through training, evaluation, and deployment
Experience with distributed systems and large-scale data processing
Experience with model serving, inference optimization, or ML pipeline engineering
Experience building APIs and services that other engineers consume
Strong collaboration and communication skills
Comfortable navigating ambiguity in fast-moving areas
BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with LLM inference optimization (batching, quantization, KV caching, tensor parallelism)
Experience with model serving frameworks (vLLM, TensorRT, Ray Serve, or similar)
Experience with embedding models and retrieval systems - fine-tuning encoders on graded or contrastive objectives, pooling strategies, dimensionality reduction for serving cost, vector databases, and retrieval evaluation (NDCG, recall, graded relevance)
Experience with fine-tuning and alignment workflows (SFT, DPO, LoRA, RLHF, RLVR, GRPO, reward modeling)
Experience with feature engineering and feature serving platforms (e.g. Feast, Tecton, Hopsworks), distributed data processing frameworks (e.g. Spark, Flink, Ray), offline stores (e.g. Iceberg, Delta, Lance), and online stores (e.g. Redis, Cassandra, DynamoDB)
Experience with Ray, Kubernetes, and cloud GPU infrastructure (AWS, GCP)
Experience with ML governance, lineage, or compliance systems

Pay & Benefits — Seattle, Washington, United States

At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $142,300 and $263,300, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.

Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs. Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan. You’ll also receive benefits including: Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation. Learn more about Apple Benefits

Note: Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

Application Deadline

Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.