Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Knowledge Platforms

About the role

The Answers, Knowledge, and Information team is at the forefront of revolutionizing how hundreds of millions of people use their devices to obtain information. As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will play a critical role in developing world-class search and Q&A experiences for Apple customers using cutting-edge search technologies and large language models.

Responsibilities

• Develop the ranking and retrieval technologies that power question answering and search across Apple products
• Contribute to the development of next-generation Search and Question Answering systems across Apple products, including Siri, Safari, Spotlight, and more
• Collaborate with world-renowned experts in large-scale data management, machine learning systems, and knowledge extraction
• Drive advancements in question answering and search, as well as the underlying ranking and retrieval technologies
• Shape how people obtain information by leveraging your Search and applied machine learning expertise, along with robust software engineering skills

About the team

The team operates in one of the most dynamic high-performance computing environments, managing petabytes of data and millions of queries per second. You will collaborate closely with product, data science, and infrastructure teams, working alongside machine learning engineers, product specialists, and infrastructure experts.

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field
• 7+ years of industry or academia experience in machine learning, with a focus on search, NLP, or recommender systems
• Strong programming skills in C/C++ or Python, and experience with ML frameworks
• Proficient understanding of search algorithms and familiarity with evaluation metrics for search and information retrieval
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills

Preferred qualifications

• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field
• 5+ years of industry or academia experience in machine learning, with a focus on search, NLP, or recommender systems
• Familiarity with NLP/ML tools and packages like JAX, TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc.
• Experience working with transformer-based models (e.g., BERT, T5) in a search context
• Prior industry experience on large scale search systems
• Ability to quickly prototype ideas and solutions, perform critical analysis, and use creative approaches for solving complex problems