Senior ML Data Engineer

Apple’s ML Data Team within the Intelligent System Experience (ISE) group is building high-quality machine learning datasets at scale to support important Apple product capabilities. In this Senior ML Data Engineer role, you will help acquire, synthesize, annotate, and validate ML data while improving the pipelines that keep it reliable and ready for training.

The work supports ML and AI-centric features across Apple products, from experiences like iPhone Lock Screen wallpaper and iMessage stickers to Apple Intelligence capabilities such as on-device Genmoji and visual generative models, as well as models used in Photos for faces and memories.

Role focus

• Build high quality datasets at scale.
• Acquire, synthesize, annotate, and ensure the quality of ML data, partnering with R&D teams in Apple’s SWE organization.
• Continuously improve ML data pipelines.

What you’ll bring

• 7+ years of industry experience as a data engineer supporting multiple ML applications, with vision domain preferred.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Proven experience designing, automating, and scaling large data pipelines (petabyte scale desired) using modern processing technologies, with examples including Iceberg, BigQuery, Airflow, and Spark.
• Expertise in Python, Go, or another modern programming language, including experience producing high quality, efficient code and participating in code reviews.
• Ability to design and lead a technical roadmap, collaborate across cross-functional teams and diverse profiles, and influence to build alignment.
• Demonstrated experience delivering large scale multimodal datasets for foundation models.
• Self-starter with the ability to handle ambiguity, identify risks, mitigate issues, and independently determine the right people and tools to deliver.
• Track record of mentoring and growing engineers, lifting software engineering excellence in a ML data ops team that often focuses on short-term delivery.

Technologies

• Python
• Go
• Iceberg
• BigQuery
• Airflow
• Spark

Compensation and location

• Location: Cupertino, CA (onsite)
• Base pay range: USD 184,700 to 324,800 per year
• Base pay depends on skills, qualifications, experience, and location

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical and dental coverage
• Retirement benefits
• Discounted products and free services
• Reimbursement for certain educational expenses, including tuition
• Discretionary employee stock programs, including eligibility for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and the ability to purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in the Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Discretionary bonuses or commission payments, plus relocation (if eligible)