Lead AI Researcher - RL Agents & Agentic ML

Apple, Inc.; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 216,000 - 394,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive medical and dental

Employee stock programs & RSUs

Relocation assistance

Discounted products

Job summary

Apple is seeking a hands-on AIML Research Lead in Cupertino to drive reinforcement learning and post-training for agentic capabilities. You will manage a small team of senior researchers, run experiments, and contribute code while shaping research directions across RL, tool‑calling, synthetic environments, and multimodal agents.

You will build data pipelines, guide infrastructure, and collaborate with partner teams to align research with on‑device and hybrid compute realities.

Qualifications

• PhD in machine learning or related field or equivalent research experience.
• 7–10+ years of research experience beyond PhD in industry or as an academic research lead.
• Strong track record in RL and/or post-training of large models, demonstrated via publications, open-source contributions, or shipped systems.
• Leadership experience: setting research direction and directing others' work.
• Experience owning ML infrastructure, frameworks and codebases, including open-source research frameworks or environment suites.

Responsibilities

• Lead research on RL and post-training for agentic capabilities and verifier design.
• Build and own synthetic data and task-generation pipelines and curricula for capable agents.
• Drive codebases and infrastructure for the core RL research effort and collaborate with partner teams.
• Manage and mentor a small team of senior researchers and researchers with distinct specialties.
• Stay hands-on: run experiments, write code, and contribute to core technical problems.
• Coordinate with teams on environment/agent co-optimization and deployment constraints.

Skills

RL research

Agentic AI

Team leadership

ML infrastructure

Publications/Open-source

Education

PhD in ML or related field

Equivalent research experience

Tools

Open-source ML frameworks

Environment suites

Job description

Apple is seeking a hands-on AIML Research Lead in Cupertino to drive reinforcement learning and post-training for agentic capabilities. You will manage a small team of senior researchers, run experiments, and contribute code while shaping research directions across RL, tool‑calling, synthetic environments, and multimodal agents.

You will build data pipelines, guide infrastructure, and collaborate with partner teams to align research with on‑device and hybrid compute realities.