Sr Machine Learning Engineer - ML Platform

Apple Ads is building a machine learning platform that helps advertising teams improve models and scale ML features while meeting privacy commitments. As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer on the ML Platform team, you will design and implement secure, scalable backend capabilities and work with ML engineers and scientists to deliver production-grade platform improvements.

This onsite role is based in New York, NY and supports the development of platform systems used to power Ads machine learning across the lifecycle.

What you’ll do

• Design and develop secure, scalable back-end systems for ML platform capabilities.
• Build high-performing systems from the ground up with strong engineering rigor.
• Partner with ML engineers and scientists to design, develop, and build platform capabilities that enable Ads teams to improve and scale ML features, models, and applications.
• Contribute to machine learning product development that supports Apple’s privacy commitments and changes how advertising uses data.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience and a PhD in Computer Science or related field.
• Experience writing mission-critical production code for machine learning systems.
• Experience building ML infrastructure, frameworks, or services used by multiple teams.
• Experience building SDKs, APIs, and automation UIs used by development teams.
• Proven experience building automation and CI/CD.
• Passion for improving developer experience for AI/ML practitioners.
• Solid understanding of the ML lifecycle: training, evaluation, deployment, and serving/inferencing, with experience building and deploying models.
• Working knowledge of model evaluation, including train-serve skew and data drift.
• Working knowledge of deep learning architectures and training frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Prior experience applying ML at scale in advertising, recommender systems, information retrieval, or related domains.
• Strong problem solving, debugging, and performance tuning skills.
• Results oriented with effective written and verbal communication across technical and non-technical teams.
• Product-minded approach with a track record of taking ownership of projects.

Technologies

• PyTorch
• TensorFlow

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in the advertising industry.
• Experience with distributed training and/or optimizing large-scale models for low-latency serving.
• Experience building infrastructure for diverse model development use cases including LLMs, multimodal models, classical ML, and reinforcement learning.
• Experience building and/or operationalizing foundation models.
• Experience with agentic AI.
• Prior experience in privacy-preserving ML.
• Education and experience equivalencies: PhD with 3+ years engineering and 5+ years machine learning; MS with 6+ years engineering and 5+ years machine learning; or BS with 7+ years engineering and 5+ years machine learning.

Compensation and benefits

• Base pay range: $184,700 - $277,600 per year. Base pay depends on skills, qualifications, experience, and location.
• Eligibility for discretionary restricted stock unit awards (if eligible) and participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs.
• Eligible to purchase Apple stock at a discount through the Employee Stock Purchase Plan (if voluntarily participating).
• May be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments and relocation (if eligible).
• Comprehensive medical and dental coverage.
• Retirement benefits.
• Discounted products and free services.
• Reimbursement for certain educational expenses, including tuition.
• Note: benefits, compensation, and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and plan or program terms.