Machine Learning Engineer - Proactive

Apple is building intelligent search and AI experiences that understand user intent, context, and personal information while preserving privacy. In this onsite role in Cupertino, you will help advance semantic retrieval and modern AI systems, from embeddings and reranking to retrieval-augmented generation, with a focus on efficient on-device deployment and low-latency inference.

The role emphasizes designing and shipping production-ready retrieval pipelines and improving the software infrastructure that supports them. You will work across engineering, research, product, and design to translate AI research into reliable, scalable capabilities across Apple’s ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Design, optimize, and deploy relevant, personalized, and context-aware experiences using semantic retrieval systems and ranking models across Apple’s ecosystem.
• Build semantic retrieval, embedding, reranking, and retrieval-augmented generation systems to improve search quality and AI-powered experiences.
• Enhance underlying software infrastructure and optimize solutions for low-latency inference.
• Collaborate with engineers, researchers, product managers, and designers to move AI capabilities from research into production, including technical strategy and exploration of foundation models, multimodal AI, agentic retrieval, and personalized intelligence.

Requirements

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field.
• Experience building and deploying semantic search, retrieval, or ranking systems at scale in a production environment.
• Hands-on experience with retrieval-augmented generation, dense retrieval, or neural reranking pipelines.
• Experience adapting or distilling large foundation models into compact, efficient models for on-device deployment.
• Familiarity with model optimization techniques such as quantization, pruning, or knowledge distillation.
• Experience designing and running offline evaluations and online experiments (A/B testing) to measure search quality, ranking, or model performance.
• Strong understanding of query understanding, intent modeling, or personalization in search or recommendation systems.
• Experience working across cross-functional teams to ship AI-powered features in consumer products.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field.
• Background in machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, search, recommender systems, or generative AI.
• Experience with semantic retrieval, embedding models, reranking, or retrieval-augmented generation systems.
• Programming skills in Python and/or C/C++, with experience building production-quality software using modern machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.

Technologies

• Python
• C/C++
• PyTorch
• JAX
• TensorFlow
• A/B testing

Compensation and Benefits

• Base pay range: $150,400 to $277,600 per year.
• Opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs.
• Discretionary restricted stock unit awards.
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan: purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating.
• Comprehensive medical and dental coverage.
• Retirement benefits.
• Discounted products and free services.
• Reimbursement for certain educational expenses, including tuition, for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple.
• Discretionary bonuses or commission payments and relocation may be eligible.

Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field.

Location: Cupertino, CA (onsite).