Staff/Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Knowledge Platform

About Apple

Apple is where individual imaginations come together, committing to the values that lead to great work. Every new product we build, service we create, or Apple Store experience we deliver is the result of us strengthening each other's ideas. That happens because every one of us believes that we can make something wonderful and share it with the world, changing lives for the better. Here, you'll do more than join something — you'll add something.

About the Role

The Information Intelligence team is redefining how billions of people use their devices to get information. We are an Applied ML team pushing the limits of question answering, assistant response ranking, and search technologies, while also responsible for a production service. We are part of a wider effort to power information across a variety of Apple products – including Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Messages, Lookup, and more.

As a Staff/Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you play a critical role in developing world-class Search and Q&A experiences for Apple customers with cutting-edge search technologies and large language models.

Responsibilities

As a member of our fast-paced group, you'll have the unique and rewarding opportunity to shape upcoming products from Apple. Our team includes a diversity of backgrounds from applied scientists with a focus in NLP to experienced distributed systems engineers.

• Shape how people get information by leveraging your Search and applied machine learning expertise along with robust software engineering skills
• Collaborate with outstanding Search and AI engineers on large scale machine learning to improve Query Understanding, Retrieval, and Ranking
• Develop fundamental building blocks needed for AI powered experiences such as fine-tuning and reinforcement learning
• Push the boundaries on document retrieval and ranking, developing sophisticated machine learning models
• Use embeddings and deep learning to understand the quality of matches
• Implement online learning to react quickly to change and natural language processing to understand queries
• Work with petabytes of data and combine information from multiple structured and unstructured sources to provide the best results and accurate answers to satisfy users' information-seeking needs
• Leverage and improve upon the latest deep learning techniques, such as LLM and RAG, in order to understand queries and user intents, rank documents, and find useful answers to users' questions
• Train, fine-tune and deploy models at scale, using the latest advances for online inference optimization
• Deliver tooling and frameworks to evaluate individual components and end-to-end quality
• Systematically identify opportunities to improve search relevance and answer accuracy

Minimum Qualifications

• MS in Computer Science or related field
• 10+ years of work experience in machine learning, deep learning or related field
• 10+ years experience in shipping Search and Q&A technologies and ML systems
• Excellent programming skills in mainstream programming languages such as C++, Python, Scala, and Go
• Experience delivering tooling and frameworks to evaluate individual components and end-to-end quality
• Strong analytical skills to systematically identify opportunities to improve search relevance and answer accuracy
• Strong written and verbal communication with the ability to articulate complex topics
• Excellent interpersonal skills and teamwork; demonstrated ability to connect and collaborate with others
• Passion for building phenomenal products and curiosity to learn

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Data Science or related field
• Strong industry background and experience in search and related technologies (LLMs, Machine Learning, NLP, Information Retrieval, Question Answering)
• Strong and validated experience of ML development and production systems
• Experience working with foundation models and LLMs