Machine Learning Engineer - Apple News

Apple Inc.; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical and dental coverage

Retirement benefits

Employee stock programs

Tuition reimbursement

Job summary

Apple News is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to build, operate, and scale ML-powered features for content tagging, ranking, and personalization. You’ll work on model serving, deployment pipelines, and on-device considerations, collaborating with data science and platform teams to deliver reliable, low-latency systems at Apple scale.

Join a team focused on privacy-preserving personalization and high-performance ML infrastructure, with opportunities to impact millions of users daily.

Qualifications

• MS or equivalent experience in computer science, ML, or related field.
• 2+ years of industry experience in ML infrastructure or software engineering.
• Proficiency in Java and/or Python with production-serving interest.
• Experience with ML infrastructure components: model serving, deployment pipelines, or feature delivery.
• Exposure to AWS and/or GCP and deployment trade-offs.
• Familiarity with RAG concepts and Spark-based data pipelines.
• Strong communication across teams.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain infrastructure to host and serve ML models with focus on latency and scalability.
• Evaluate tools and frameworks for model serving and feature delivery.
• Collaborate to build shared data processing libraries and optimize ML workloads.
• Design reusable data pipelines for training data collection and labeling.
• Implement model monitoring, observability, and alerting for production ML systems.
• Analyze user interaction data to improve training data and model metrics.

Skills

Java

Python

ML infrastructure

Model serving

Kubernetes

Spark

Cloud platforms

Education

MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related

Tools

Kubernetes

Spark

Cassandra

Solr

Spring Boot

AWS

GCP

Job description

Cupertino, California, United States Software and Services

Apple News is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to help build, operate, and grow the systems that power intelligent features for millions of people every day. In this role, you will build hands-on experience with model serving, deployment pipelines, distributed systems, and ML platform infrastructure, working alongside senior engineers to ship reliable, high-performance ML-powered features across content tagging, ranking, and personalization. You are someone who is excited to grow at the intersection of software engineering and machine learning, and takes pride in contributing to the infrastructure that makes great models matter at scale. At Apple News, our ML problems are uniquely hard, spanning privacy-preserving personalization, on-device considerations, and the balance between editorial and algorithmic curation, and we're looking for engineers who are eager to learn and grow while helping solve them.

Description

As a Machine Learning Engineer on the Apple News team, you will contribute to building and operating the infrastructure that powers ML-driven product features spanning content tagging, ranking, clustering, and personalization. With guidance from senior engineers, you will help build and maintain systems that host, serve, and monitor both classical and deep learning models in production, with a focus on reliability, low latency, and scalability at Apple scale. You will develop your understanding of trade-offs across tools and technologies, contribute to architectural discussions, and help drive well-scoped pieces of ML infrastructure from concept to production. You will collaborate closely with modeling, product, data science, and platform teams to help define requirements and deliver features that have measurable impact on user engagement and content quality.

Responsibilities

• Build and help maintain infrastructure to host and serve classical ML models (gradient boosting, SVMs) and deep learning models (transformers, neural rankers) in production, with a focus on latency, reliability, and scalability
• Contribute to the evaluation of tools, frameworks, and infrastructure (Kubernetes, Spark, Cassandra, Solr, Spring Boot, AWS, GCP) for model serving and feature delivery, developing a growing understanding of trade-offs across latency, cost, scalability, and reliability
• Collaborate with model development teams to contribute to a shared codebase, build common data processing libraries, and help profile/optimize ML workloads
• Build reusable infrastructure components for data pipelines, such as sampling and collecting data for training, and labeling via human annotations or LLMs
• Help design and implement model monitoring, observability, and alerting systems to support production ML systems in meeting reliability and performance SLAs
• Analyze real-world user interaction data, with guidance from senior teammates, to help uncover gaps in training data distributions and derive model success metrics

Minimum Qualifications

• MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related discipline, or equivalent work experience in this domain
• 2+ years of industry experience in machine learning infrastructure or software engineering with exposure to ML systems
• Solid proficiency in Java and/or Python, with an interest in production serving systems
• Experience contributing to or building components of ML infrastructure: model serving, deployment pipelines, or feature delivery systems
• Some exposure to deploying ML models on cloud platforms (AWS and/or GCP), with a developing understanding of deployment trade-offs across latency, cost, and scalability
• Familiarity with RAG concepts (retrieval, embedding, chunking, or reranking strategies) is a plus
• Experience building or contributing to data pipelines for A/B test analysis or training dataset creation using tools such as Apache Spark
• Good cross-functional communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly to teammates

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with inference optimization techniques such as quantization, batching, caching, and model distillation to improve serving efficiency
• Exposure to embedding pipeline infrastructure or vector store concepts, such as indexing strategies, approximate nearest neighbor search, and latency vs. recall considerations
• Interest in content personalization or recommendation systems at consumer scale
• Any experience contributing to AI-powered features with measurable impact on user engagement or content quality

At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $150,400 and $225,300, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.

Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple's discretionary employee stock programs. Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in Apple's Employee Stock Purchase Plan. You'll also receive benefits including: Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses - including tuition. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation. Learn more about Apple Benefits

Note: Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant

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Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.