Senior Machine Learning Engineer Search Capabilities, Proactive

Summary

The Siri team is redefining how hundreds of millions of people access information across Apple devices — with privacy built in from the ground up. As part of the Applied ML team, you will advance Apple Intelligence through agentic search, result ranking, and low-latency production services that power experiences across Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Messages, and more. Our team researches and builds deep search systems for Personal Question Answering — enabling Siri to answer questions about a user's emails, messages, events, files, and more, while keeping personal data private.

Description

You will apply agentic search techniques to enhance user productivity and improve Siri's ability to answer questions about personal content. You will own models responsible for answering user questions using personal documents — with privacy at the forefront — and integrate these with broader Siri capabilities to deliver powerful, intuitive experiences. You will contribute across the full research and development lifecycle, from defining quality metrics and evaluation frameworks to building data pipelines and shaping the long-term technical vision for Personal Question Answering.

Responsibilities

Research, design, implement, and evaluate agentic search systems and underlying models to improve quality, performance, and Personal Question Answering capabilities
Extend and improve search technologies through prompt optimization, context management, post-training techniques, and high-quality data pipeline development
Define quality metrics and evaluation benchmarks; build evaluation platforms and design experiments to validate hypotheses and support team-wide decisions
Collaborate with partner teams to define product requirements, priorities, and opportunities to enhance Personal Question Answering
Define the long-term technical vision for Personal Question Answering quality; identify problem areas and integrate solutions into a broader roadmap

Minimum Qualifications

8 or more years of industry experience in machine learning, natural language processing, and applying these techniques at scale
Software engineering proficiency in Python, Go, or C/C++
Experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow, or XGBoost
Written and verbal communication skills
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Preferred Qualifications

Knowledge of training, evaluating, and deploying deep learning models and large language models for production systems
Experience building production machine learning systems in search, recommendation systems, or information retrieval
Ability to prototype solutions and perform analysis to evaluate results
Background in search relevance and ranking, question answering, personalization, user behavior modeling, or data-driven decision-making
Advanced degree (Master's or Ph.D.) in Computer Science, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience

Pay & Benefits — Santa Clara, California, 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 $216,200 and $394,000, 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.