Apple
Machine Learning Research Engineer, Pretraining Data — Foundation Models
$150K–$278K
Cupertino, California · Full-time · Posted Oct 21, 2026
- Education
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
About the job
Research and build algorithms and scalable systems for curating and optimizing pretraining data to improve foundation-model capabilities.
What you'll do
- Design algorithms for pretraining-data curation, including quality filtering, deduplication, selection, and mixture optimization.
- Build scalable data-processing systems and turn research prototypes into production-ready infrastructure.
- Collaborate on training experiments, analyze model performance, and study how data affects model capabilities.
What they ask for
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Strong programming skills in Python and proficiency developing production-quality software.
- Experience with large-scale data processing, distributed computing, or machine learning systems.
- Solid understanding of machine learning fundamentals and modern deep learning architectures.
Nice to have
- Experience with LLM pretraining, training data research, or foundation model development.
- Experience with Spark, Ray, or similar distributed computing frameworks.
Pay
$150,400 and $277,600 (base salary)
Tools
Python, Spark, Ray, PyTorch
AI focus
Research and engineering for foundation-model pretraining data, including curation, quality assessment, synthetic data generation, data efficiency, and evaluation of effects on model performance.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative