Apple
Staff Machine Learning Research Engineer, App Store Search
$175K–$308K
Seattle, Washington · Staff · Full-time · Posted Jul 10, 2026
- Experience
- 3+ years required; preferred qualifications cite 7+ years of hands-on experience in Search and Conversational systems.
- Education
- Preferred: MS or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related subject area.
About the job
Leads research and engineering for large-scale search and conversational discovery systems across Apple services and devices, from ML strategy and training through production deployment.
What you'll do
- Architect retrieval, ranking, indexing, query and document understanding, and agentic/RAG-based capabilities; define the search ML roadmap.
- Own the ML lifecycle, build distributed backend components, and develop experiments, monitoring, and alerting for production systems.
- Collaborate across engineering, research, product, and platform teams; present research and mentor engineers.
What they ask for
- 3+ years of relevant industry experience building large-scale ML and data systems.
- Familiarity with search or recommendation systems, conversational engines, or related domains.
- Strong knowledge of generative AI systems, including Large Language Models, Transformers, Reinforcement Learning, RAG, and agentic patterns.
- Experience with distributed ML training frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Ray, or JAX, and inference engines like TensorRT or vLLM.
Nice to have
- MS or Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related subject area.
- 7+ years of hands-on Search and Conversational systems experience across the full product stack; big data pipelines, distributed backend services, and A/B experimentation are also preferred.
Pay
$175,000 and $308,500 (USD, base pay range)
Tools
Go, Java, Python, Scala, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Ray, JAX
AI focus
Builds next-generation search and conversational discovery features, including generative AI, LLMs, RAG, and agentic capabilities.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative