ML Engineer - Creator Studio

Summary

Creator Studio is building agentic intelligence inside Apple's professional creative apps. We aim for machine intelligence to assist and enhance creators’ intent and vision, complementing creators rather than replacing it. This team has unusual leverage: our work spans many apps, and getting a capability right lifts a whole family of professional creative tools at once.

The team is established and growing. We're looking for ML engineers who want to define the product. That means less time on models in isolation and more on the experiences they make possible, working next to the designers, quality teams, app teams, and engineers who own the workflows.

Description

You work where a frontier model meets the real depth of a professional creative app. The job is to make that meeting useful. A model's raw capability is not yet a feature, and turning it into something that helps inside a real project and holds up well enough to ship is most of what you'll do. Creative work is open-ended. That makes it hard to do well, and hard to measure. So you'll spend as much time on evaluation, prompting, and the tools and skills a model reaches for as on the models themselves.

The best creative software makes someone more capable while leaving them in charge. That balance is the hard part. The assistant should help a person move faster and push an idea further, with the craft still theirs, and getting it right is a product question as much as a modeling one. It sits at the center of this role.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and evaluate agentic AI capabilities that let people accomplish real work in professional creative apps.
Turn frontier model capability into reliable product behavior through agentic architecture, tool and skill design, and structured output.
Build rigorous evaluations and quality measures for open-ended, hard-to-score creative tasks, and use them to drive model and system improvements.
Work with on-device and server foundation models, including optimizing for the constraints of on-device inference.
Investigate model and agent failures end to end — from the user-visible symptom to the underlying cause.
Partner with product engineers, designers, the teams behind our creative apps, and creative-domain experts to translate real workflows into capabilities.

Minimum Qualifications

3+ years developing and shipping reliable, maintainable, testable code, or equivalent demonstrated experience.
Hands-on experience applying LLMs / foundation models or multimodal ML to real products or projects, e.g. prompting, fine-tuning, retrieval, evaluation, or agentic systems.
Strong intuition for experimental design and a repertoire of statistical techniques to measure genuine effects from noise.
A strong product sense: the judgment to ask not only "can the model do this?" but "is this the right experience?"
Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced environment and to communicate clearly with technical and non-technical partners.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience building agentic systems, LLM tool-use / function-calling, or evaluation harnesses.
Deep, hands-on experience as a professional or power user of creative tools — DAWs, NLEs, image editors, office productivity apps, or design suites. You know these workflows from the inside, and you have a point of view about what helps a creator and what gets in the way. Experience with Apple's own creative apps is not required.
We welcome non-traditional backgrounds: demonstrated product judgment and creative-domain expertise can matter as much as a conventional Computer Science or ML resume.
Strong programming skills in Python and experience with deep-learning toolkits like PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
Experience optimizing models and algorithms to run efficiently on resource-constrained / on-device platforms such as Core ML.
Experience with Swift and iOS/macOS development.
A record of publications or patents in relevant areas.

Pay & Benefits — San Diego, 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 $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.

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.