Sr. Machine Learning Engineer - Answers, Knowledge & Information (AKI)

Work on machine learning and LLMs that shape how people find useful local answers in Siri and Spotlight. In Apple’s Geo domain team in Santa Clara, CA, you will help improve query understanding and document relevance, with a focus on search quality across retrieval, ranking, reranking, and downstream answer experiences.

Compensation and benefits include a base pay range of $175,000 to $308,500 per year, comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, and a range of discounted products and free services. You may also be eligible for reimbursement for certain educational expenses (including tuition), discretionary employee stock programs, and the ability to purchase Apple stock at a discount through the Employee Stock Purchase Plan. Discretionary bonuses or commission payments and relocation (might be eligible) are also available.

Responsibilities

• Own the full ML development cycle, from opportunity analysis and exploration to prototyping, data collection, feature engineering, training, evaluation, and production deployment.
• Lead development of machine learning models that improve search quality across retrieval, ranking, and reranking, as well as query understanding.
• Improve search relevance and experience by applying techniques such as learning-to-rank, embedding models, contrastive learning, multi-task learning, and reinforcement learning where appropriate.
• Mentor junior engineers and provide technical leadership for ML system architecture and ML model design.
• Translate product requirements into modeling tasks and engineering execution.

Requirements

• Minimum 8+ years of experience in information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, or deep learning.
• Deep knowledge of ML theory, including supervised learning, ranking models, embeddings, representation learning, and evaluation metrics.
• Proven ability to apply advanced ML techniques to improve search relevance and retrieval quality at scale.
• Comfort leading experimentation, offline evaluation, and online A/B testing to iterate on search quality.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, with the ability to work independently and collaboratively in a team.
• Master’s Degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience in machine learning or a related field.

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced diploma in AI, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or Mathematics.

Technologies: LLMs