Apple
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
$175K–$325K
Cupertino, California +1 · Senior · Full-time · Posted Sep 15, 2026
- Location
- Cupertino, California
Seattle, Washington - Experience
- At least 6 years in an applied research or machine learning role.
- Education
- Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, Statistics, or a related field—or equivalent industry experience delivering production AI systems.
About the job
Develops and leads research and production deployment of LLM-powered systems for personalization, discovery, and other Apple services.
What you'll do
- Design, deploy, and optimize LLM systems, including fine-tuning, evaluation, and safety alignment.
- Lead research and product development in representation learning, NLP, semantic modeling, and retrieval-augmented generation.
- Collaborate across teams, mentor researchers, and contribute through patents, publications, and technical leadership.
What they ask for
- Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, Statistics, or a related field—or equivalent industry experience delivering production AI systems.
- Expert knowledge of deep learning and modern NLP, including transformer architectures and foundation model adaptation.
- Experience developing LLMs, including fine-tuning, instruction tuning, and prompt engineering for domain-specific reasoning.
- Proficiency in Python and PyTorch or TensorFlow, with production deployment experience.
Nice to have
- Hands-on experience with RAG pipelines and vector-based semantic search.
- Experience with personalization, ranking, optimization algorithms, or RL/multi-armed bandit platforms.
Pay
USD $184,700–$324,800 base salary; USD $175,000–$308,500 base salary
Tools
LLM, RAG, Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Spark, RLHF
AI focus
Generative AI and LLMs for personalization, intelligent automation, customer understanding, and services discovery; includes research, production systems, model adaptation, evaluation, safety alignment, and inference optimization.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative