Sr. Machine Learning Engineer - Answers, Knowledge & Information (AKI)

Apple’s Geo domain team is building machine learning and LLM-based capabilities that help Siri and Spotlight understand queries, rank documents, and surface useful answers for local information. In this senior role, you will drive improvements to search quality end to end, with ownership spanning modeling, evaluation, and production deployment.

Location: Santa Clara, CA (onsite)

Compensation: USD 175,000 to 308,500 per year (base pay range)

What You’ll Do

• Own the full machine learning development cycle, from opportunity analysis and exploration through prototyping, data collection, feature engineering, training, evaluation, and production deployment.
• Lead the development of machine learning models that improve search quality across retrieval, ranking, reranking, and query understanding.
• Use a range of approaches to improve search relevance and user experience, including learning-to-rank, embedding models, contrastive learning, multi-task learning, and reinforcement learning where appropriate.
• Mentor junior engineers and provide technical leadership for architecting ML systems and designing ML models.
• Translate product requirements into concrete modeling tasks and engineering tasks.

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, or deep learning.
• Strong understanding of machine learning theory, including supervised learning, ranking models, embeddings, representation learning, and evaluation metrics.
• Proven ability to apply advanced ML techniques to improve search relevance and retrieval quality at scale.
• Comfort leading experimentation, offline evaluation, and online A/B testing to iterate on search quality.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, with the ability to work independently and collaboratively.
• Master’s Degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience in machine learning or a related field.

Technology

• LLMs

Education

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical and dental coverage
• Retirement benefits
• A range of discounted products and free services
• Reimbursement for certain educational expenses, including tuition
• Participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs (eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards)
• Ability to purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in the Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Discretionary bonuses or commission payments, as well as relocation (might be eligible)

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced diploma in AI, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or Mathematics