Machine Learning Engineer, Web Indexing Team

About the Role

Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, great ideas have a way of becoming great products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. Bring passion and dedication to your job and there's no telling what you could accomplish.

Do you want to make Siri and Apple products smarter for our users? The MLPT & Infrastructure teams are building groundbreaking technology for algorithmic search, machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence. The features we build are redefining how hundreds of millions of people use their computers and mobile devices to search and find what they are looking for.

Our universal search engine powers search features across a variety of Apple products, including Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Messages, and Lookup. As part of this group, you will work within one of the most exciting high-performance computing environments, with petabytes of data and millions of queries per second, and have the opportunity to imagine and build products that delight our customers every single day.

Responsibilities

We design and build infrastructures to support features that empower billions of Apple users through advanced intelligence systems. Our team processes trillions of links to find the best content to surface to users via search and other intelligent features.

• Analyze pages to extract critical features for indexing, ranking, and retrieval
• Apply statistical analysis to enhance link selection, content freshness, retrieval rates, and extraction quality
• Build a generic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) indexing infrastructure framework to allow indexing building customization and support fast experiment iteration
• Dive deeper into RAG systems, as well as large-scale data processing, managing trillions of records and petabytes of data

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong focus on large-scale distributed systems or infrastructure
• Strong coding proficiency in one or more languages (e.g., Python, Java, Go, C++)
• Solid foundation in computer science fundamentals including algorithms and data structures
• Hands-on experience with large-scale data processing and MapReduce-style frameworks (e.g., Spark, Hadoop)
• Experience with cloud services, particularly AWS (S3, EC2, EKS) and/or Kubernetes-based orchestration
• Proven ability to operate independently and drive projects end-to-end in a collaborative team environment
• MS or PhD in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated impact at a senior or staff level
• Experience designing and building RAG systems or other AI/ML indexing pipelines
• Background in machine learning, natural language processing, or information retrieval
• Experience managing systems operating at petabyte scale with trillions of records
• Strong communication skills with a track record of influencing technical direction across teams
• MS or PhD in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience