Lead Machine Learning Engineer, Human Sensing

Apple’s Human and Object Understanding (HOUr) team is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer (Technical Lead) to shape the technical direction of a multimodal Human Sensing team. In this role, you will guide ML program scope, evaluation standards, dataset strategy, and hands-on on-device optimization while maintaining codebase quality.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary technical lead in partnership with engineering management to define project scope, technical milestones, and roadmap execution, including rigorous KPI targets and quality benchmarks across demographics, environmental conditions, and device use cases.
• Define dataset collection, annotation, and curation strategy in collaboration with the Data team to systematically address model blind spots.
• Architect and lead the team’s core evaluation framework and benchmarking pipelines, including custom metrics, evaluation scripts, and automated tooling to stress-test models against production scenarios.
• Lead failure mode analysis, root-cause investigation, and edge-case discovery to drive focused iterations on models and data.
• Drive multi-team alignment across Evaluation, Integration, and Data Operations, coordinating day-to-day technical execution.
• Partner with integration and other teams to drive model optimization.
• Train, fine-tune, and run experiments with state-of-the-art vision architectures as needed to unblock research or validate hypotheses.
• Act as the primary maintainer of the team’s core codebase, authoring and reviewing PRs, maintaining engineering hygiene, and supporting rapid iteration velocity.
• Communicate technical strategy, performance trade-offs, and progress to stakeholders and senior leadership, and guide and mentor junior and mid-level engineers.
• Stay current with advances in machine learning, multimodal foundation models, computer vision, and natural language understanding.

Required Qualifications

• Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience) with 6+ years of industry experience in Computer Vision and Machine Learning.
• Proven experience in a Technical Lead or Staff-level capacity, including project scoping, KPI definition, and leading technical initiatives across cross-functional teams.
• Strong expertise in evaluating complex ML systems, defining benchmarking methodologies, and performing deep-dive failure analysis.
• Ability to coordinate engineering teams, mentor peers, and work closely with management on roadmap execution.
• Strong attention to detail, ownership mindset, and agility in fast-evolving research environments.
• Deep proficiency in Python and PyTorch, including hands-on experience writing clean, maintainable code and managing shared repositories.

Technologies

• Python, PyTorch
• Core ML
• Quantization-aware training, knowledge distillation
• Latency profiling, quantization, pruning
• Multimodal foundation models
• Computer vision, natural language understanding
• Face recognition
• Identity re-identification (ReID)
• Foundation vision models
• Large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs)
• Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (LLMs)
• Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs)

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep domain knowledge in face recognition, identity re-identification (ReID), biometrics, or visual human sensing (pose, expression, human-object interaction).
• Hands-on experience collaborating with Data Collection and Annotation teams to design collection protocols and active learning datasets.
• Experience with on-device model optimization (quantization-aware training, knowledge distillation, Core ML conversion, latency profiling).
• Experience with foundation vision models or large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
• Hands-on experience training and scaling multi-modal LLMs or large-scale vision-language models (VLMs).
• Experience with on-device ML, model optimization (knowledge distillation, quantization, pruning), or production-grade ML pipelines.
• Research and innovation background demonstrated through publications in top-tier journals or conferences, patents, or impactful software developments.

Pay & Benefits

• Base pay range: $175,000 to $308,500 per year (determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location).
• Comprehensive medical and dental coverage.
• Retirement benefits.
• Discounted products and free services.
• Reimbursement for certain educational expenses, including tuition, for eligible formal education.
• Discretionary bonuses or commission payments (may be eligible).
• Relocation (may be eligible).
• Opportunity to become an Apple shareholder via participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs.
• Eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards.
• Can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in the Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
• Note: Benefits, compensation, and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and terms of the applicable plan or program.

Role Location

Seattle, WA (onsite).