Apple
Staff / Sr. ML Engineer, Indexing Infrastructure
$216K–$325K
Santa Clara, California · Staff · Full-time · Posted Oct 29, 2026
- Experience
- 5+ years designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems.
- Education
- MS or PhD in Computer Science or related field.
About the job
Build and operate large-scale indexing infrastructure that processes web data and supports search and Apple Intelligence experiences across Apple products.
What you'll do
- Design and build a petabyte-scale Parquet/Iceberg web signal lakehouse.
- Build and improve an in-house MapReduce-style processing framework running on Kubernetes.
- Improve system performance, reliability, and cost; own production health, on-call, and root-cause fixes.
What they ask for
- Strong coding skills and a solid computer science background in algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems.
- Hands-on experience with petabyte-scale batch data processing, such as MapReduce or Spark.
- Proficiency in cloud-native architectures and compute orchestration on AWS (S3, EC2, EKS) and Kubernetes.
- Excellent interpersonal skills, ability to work independently, and ability to drive cross-team efforts.
Nice to have
- Familiarity with columnar and lakehouse formats, storage internals, workflow orchestration, and resource scheduling on shared Kubernetes clusters.
- Experience with key-value or online serving stores, multi-cloud data movement, search indexing, machine learning, or NLP.
Pay
USD $216,200 to $324,800 base salary
Tools
Parquet, Iceberg, MapReduce, Kubernetes, AWS, S3, EC2, EKS
AI focus
The infrastructure supports machine learning and artificial intelligence, including Apple Intelligence and search experiences.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative