Data Scientist - Intelligent Experiences, MLO

Summary

Do you believe machine learning and AI can change the world? We do. We're the ML Data team within Apple's Intelligent System Experience (ISE) group, and we build the high-quality, high-scale datasets that train the ML features across many Apple products — iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and AirPods. Our work sits behind some of the most visible and personal experiences Apple ships: the wallpaper on your Lock Screen, personalized stickers in iMessage, on-device Genmoji and other Apple Intelligence generative models, and models that recognize faces and build memories of the people you love in Photos.

We're looking for a data scientist who's passionate about ML data and excited to shape the training data behind Apple's next generation of multi-modal features. The ideal candidate thrives in a fast-paced environment, brings rigorous scientific reasoning and owns problems end-to-end.

Join us and you’ll shape shipping products from your first week, working with petabytes of multi-modal data.

Description

You will design and operate the end-to-end data lifecycle that supports training, fine-tuning, and evaluation of large language models and diffusion models. Day to day, that means building distributed pipelines that clean, deduplicate, and enrich massive multi-modal datasets; standing up synthetic data generation pipelines with LLM-based generators, validators, and judges; and engineering agentic workflows — multi-step, tool-using LLM systems — that scale human judgment across far more data than a human team could review directly.

Responsibilities

Design synthetic data generation pipelines — prompt/context engineering, generator/critic loops, diversity and contamination controls and prove the data's impact on model quality through controlled ablations
Engineer agentic workflows (multi-step, tool-using, multi-agent LLM systems) or LLM-based flows (RAG, fine tuning) for curation, annotation, labeling QA, and evaluation, with human-in-the-loop checkpoints where they matter
Define and run quality evaluation for synthetic assets: perceptual and reference-based metrics alongside VLM judges and human preference studies
Fine-tune and evaluate LLMs and diffusion models for specific downstream tasks; run controlled ablations that isolate the contribution of each data intervention
Partner cross-functionally with modeling, product, and privacy/legal teams to translate data tradeoffs into decisions, and identify strategic opportunities to improve our data capabilities
Track and evaluate emerging techniques in data curation and generative AI, and make evidence-based recommendations about what to adopt

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or a related engineering field
5+ years of hands-on experience applying NLP, computer vision, or multimodal machine learning to production systems, including experience with large-scale data pipelines

Preferred Qualifications

Experience prompting, fine-tuning, and evaluating LLMs or vision-language/diffusion models for specific downstream tasks
Experience with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA/QLoRA), preference optimization (RLHF, DPO), RAG and retrieval-based data curation
Experience designing, evaluating and productionizing data science algorithms used for data curation, data filtering, deduplication and data down-selection.
Experience designing controlled experiments or ablation studies to understand effect of data on model quality
Experience building agentic or multi-agent, tool-using LLM systems and human-in-the-loop workflows, calibrating judges against human labels, and mitigating failure modes
Strong software engineering skills, with 5+ years in Python, workflow orchestration (Airflow), cloud platforms (AWS, GCP), distributed data processing frameworks (Spark, Ray, or similar) at large scale
Publication record or open-source contributions in NLP, computer vision, or generative AI is a plus
Familiarity with privacy-preserving data techniques (e.g., differential privacy, on-device data constraints) is a plus

Pay & Benefits — Cupertino, 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 $150,400 and $277,600, 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.