Sr Machine Learning Engineer - ML Data

The Sr Machine Learning Engineer, ML Data role on Apple’s Ads Machine Learning Platform team focuses on building secure, scalable back-end systems and machine learning products. You will help improve and scale ML features, models, and applications for advertising while protecting user privacy, partnering closely with ML engineers and scientists to deliver platform capabilities for continuous experimentation.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop secure, scalable back-end systems.
• Build high-performing systems with quality engineering from the ground up.
• Collaborate with ML engineers and scientists to design, develop, and deliver platform capabilities that enable Ads teams to improve and scale ML features, models, and applications.
• Select appropriate technologies and craft solutions for ad network challenges.
• Contribute to machine learning products that align with Apple privacy commitments and support new ways advertising works with data.
• Improve reliability, simplicity, and scalability across platform and product work.

Requirements

• Experience writing mission-critical production code for machine learning systems.
• Experience building ML infrastructure, frameworks, or services used by multiple teams.
• Experience building or operating feature stores, or comparable ML data infrastructure serving production models.
• Experience with embedding management, including generating and versioning embeddings, refresh and retirement policy, and storing and serving embeddings for retrieval at scale.
• Solid understanding of the ML lifecycle, including training, evaluation, deployment, and serving or inference, with hands-on experience building and deploying models.
• Understanding of model evaluation, train-serve skew, and data drift.
• Working knowledge of deep learning architectures and training frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience applying machine learning at scale in advertising, recommender systems, information retrieval, or related areas.
• Experience with training data generation across multi-modal data (text, image, and structured), including sampling and point-in-time correctness.
• Experience building production data pipelines for ML systems where scale and performance are critical, using distributed processing systems.
• Experience building ML systems using batch and streaming deployments, workflow orchestration, and modern storage formats.
• Strong data modeling and data architecture skills with a high bar for correctness, reliability, testing, and validation.
• Strong problem-solving, debugging, and performance tuning skills, along with a focus on automation, tooling, and CI/CD.
• Results-oriented approach and the ability to communicate effectively with technical and non-technical cross-functional teams.
• Product-minded mindset with demonstrated ownership of projects.

Technologies

• PyTorch
• TensorFlow
• LLM-based data generation or evaluation
• Agentic AI

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in the advertising industry.
• Experience with LLM-based data generation or evaluation.
• Familiarity with large-scale distributed training and data infrastructure needs.
• Prior experience in privacy-preserving ML.
• Familiarity with agentic AI.
• PhD in Computer Science or related field with 3+ years of engineering experience and 5+ years of machine learning experience; or MS in Computer Science or related field with 6+ years of engineering experience and 5+ years of machine learning experience; or BS in Computer Science or related field with 7+ years of engineering experience and 5+ years of machine learning experience.

Pay & Benefits

Salary range: USD 184,700 - 277,600 per year.

• Participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs.
• Eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards.
• Ability to purchase Apple stock at a discount through the Employee Stock Purchase Plan (if you voluntarily participate).
• Comprehensive medical and dental coverage.
• Retirement benefits.
• Range of discounted products and free services.
• Reimbursement for certain educational expenses, including tuition.
• Discretionary bonuses or commission payments, as well as relocation (role may be eligible).
• Learn more about Apple Benefits.

Apple benefit, compensation, and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

Location

Cupertino, CA (onsite)

Minimum Experience

3+ years