Evaluation & Insights Machine Learning Engineer

Apple Inc.; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple is seeking an Evaluation & Insights Engineer for the Human-Centered AI team to help evaluate and improve AI systems by combining data science, model behavior analysis, and qualitative insights. In this role, you will analyze AI outputs, develop evaluation frameworks, and translate findings into actionable improvements for product and engineering teams.

You will work cross-functionally with the Engineering and Project Managers, Product, and Research teams to ensure AI experiences are

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's in CS/ML/AI or related field.
• 8+ years in ML Engineering or Applied Research.
• Python and PyTorch, JAX, Hugging Face proficiency.
• Experience building scalable ML inference pipelines and evaluation workflows.
• Ability to interpret unstructured model outputs and synthesize findings into engineering actions.
• Hands-on work with LLMs, multimodal models, and NLP systems.
• Familiar with AI quality metrics, hallucination detection, RLHF/DPO, and LLM-as-a-judge frameworks.
• Experience building internal tools via MLflow or Weights & Biases.
• Strong prompt engineering, RAG architectures, and fine-tuning.

Responsibilities

• Lead rigorous model evaluations for LLMs and multimodal models.
• Develop evaluation frameworks to quantify quality metrics (helpfulness, factuality, safety).
• Translate qualitative failure modes into actionable improvements.
• Partner with engineering to refine model behavior and prompts.
• Map error taxonomies using embedding-based analyses.
• Develop MLOps workflows for evaluation metrics and CI/CD pipelines.
• Architect distributed evaluation pipelines for high-throughput assessment.
• Define metrics for trust, state tracking, and interpretability.
• Build automated evaluators using LLMs for scale.
• Collaborate with ML researchers, software developers, and product managers.

Skills

Python

ML Engineering

Deep Learning

NLP Systems

Model Evaluation

RLHF/DPO

Prompt Engineering

RAG Architectures

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/ML/AI

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Hugging Face

MLflow

Weights & Biases

Ray

vLLM

Job description

Introduction

Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, great new ideas have a way of becoming extraordinary products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. Bring passion and dedication to your job and there's no telling what you could accomplish!

Are you passionate about music, movies, and the world of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning? So are we! Join our Human-Centered AI team for Apple Products. In this role, you'll represent the user perspective on new features, review and analyze data, and evaluate AI models powering everything from search and recommendations to other innovative features. Collaborate with Data Scientists, Researchers, and Engineers to drive improvements across our platforms.

Description

We are looking for an Evaluation & Insights Engineer for the Human-Centered AI team to help evaluate and improve AI systems by combining data science, model behavior analysis, and qualitative insights. In this role, you will analyze AI outputs, develop evaluation frameworks, design qualitative, and translate findings into actionable improvements for product and engineering teams. This role blends deep technical expertise with strong analytical judgment to assess, interpret, and improve the behavior of advanced AI models. You will work cross-functionally with the Engineering and Project Managers, Product, and Research teams to ensure that AI experience is reliable, safe, and aligned with human expectations.

Responsibilities

• Lead Rigorous Model Evaluations: Architect and execute comprehensive evaluation suites for LLMs and multimodal models, identifying edge cases in multi-step reasoning, factuality, adversarial robustness, safety, and alignment.
• Advanced Scoring Frameworks: Develop deterministic, heuristic, and LLM-assisted evaluation frameworks (e.g., LLM-as-a-judge, reward modeling) to quantify human-perceived quality metrics (e.g., helpfulness, hallucination rates).
• Actionable Signal Extraction: Translate qualitative failure modes into quantifiable loss patterns, programmatic guardrails, and actionable data-mixture adjustments for model training and inference.
• Improve Performance: Partner with engineering teams to refine model behavior, leveraging evaluation telemetry to inform prompt engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) strategies, and model fine-tuning.
• Latent Pattern Recognition: Apply advanced ML techniques (e.g., embedding-based clustering, representation learning, perturbation analysis) to systematically map error taxonomies and latent failure manifolds in model outputs.
• MLOps & Automation: Develop robust MLOps workflows to codify evaluation metrics, automate regression testing across model checkpoints, and integrate human-centric assessments into ML CI/CD pipelines.
• Distributed Evaluation Pipelines: Architect scalable, distributed inference and processing pipelines (e.g., Ray, vLLM) for high-throughput model evaluation, automated annotation, and output analysis at scale.
• Human-Centric Metrics: Define quantitative evaluation frameworks that capture nuanced human factors, including trust calibration, conversational state tracking, and interpretability.
• Auto-Evaluator Systems: Build automated evaluation pipelines utilizing LLMs to assess outputs at scale, optimizing for high correlation with human baseline annotations.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with ML researchers, software developers, and product managers across Apple to translate product requirements into scalable, reliable, and efficient model evaluation infrastructure.

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of human factors, HCI, or cognitive science methodologies as applied to AI system design.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of relevant industry experience in ML Engineering or Applied Research.
• Advanced proficiency in Python and modern deep learning ecosystems (PyTorch, JAX, Hugging Face).
• Proven experience building scalable ML inference pipelines, model-evaluation workflows, and structured rating frameworks for large-scale AI systems.
• Strong ability to interpret unstructured model outputs (text, transcripts, embedding spaces) and synthesize qualitative findings into actionable engineering guidance and training objectives.
• Hands‑on experience developing, fine‑tuning, or evaluating LLMs, multimodal models, and NLP systems.
• Deep familiarity with AI quality metrics, hallucination detection techniques (e.g., SelfCheckGPT), model alignment (RLHF/DPO), and LLM-as-a-judge frameworks (e.g., G-Eval, DeepEval).
• Experience building internal tools or automated pipelines for ML workflows using tools like MLflow, Weights & Biases, or similar platforms.
• Strong familiarity with advanced prompt engineering, RAG architectures (vector databases, semantic search), and Fine‑Tuning.