ML Research Engineer, Search & Discovery at Scale

Apple Inc.; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 142,300 - 263,300; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical and dental coverage

Retirement benefits

Employee stock programs

Job summary

Apple Inc. in Seattle is seeking a Machine Learning Research Engineer for App Store Search.

You will contribute to the design and development of next-generation search and conversational discovery features across Apple's platforms, collaborating with engineers and researchers to push the boundaries of ML in production. The role requires advanced degrees and hands-on experience with generative AI, transformers, and ML frameworks.

Qualifications

• MS or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related subject area.
• 2+ years of relevant industry experience in ML or data systems.
• Knowledge of generative AI systems including Large Language Models, Transformers, and techniques such as RAG and fine-tuning.
• Experience with one or more ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Familiarity with search, recommendation systems, conversational engines, or related domains.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work effectively in a collaborative team environment.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to building experiences that shape how people search & discover on Apple devices worldwide.
• Stay current with research in search, information retrieval, and generative AI, and apply new techniques to improve our systems.
• Build and improve ML models and systems across surface areas such as retrieval, ranking, query understanding, and document understanding.
• Collaborate with engineers, researchers, and product teams to understand requirements and deliver high-quality solutions.
• Develop and iterate on ML models — from data preparation and training through evaluation and production deployment.
• Build components in large-scale distributed backend systems using high-performance programming languages such as Go, Java, Python, and Scala.
• Design and run A/B experiments to objectively measure the impact of changes.
• Write automated tests and contribute to monitoring and alerting for production systems.
• Present technical work to the team and participate in design and code reviews.

Skills

Generative AI

LLMs / Transformers

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Search / IR

Communication

Education

MS or PhD in Computer Science

Tools

Scala

Python

Apache Spark

Kubernetes

Go

gRPC

Job description

Apple Inc. in Seattle is seeking a Machine Learning Research Engineer for App Store Search.

You will contribute to the design and development of next-generation search and conversational discovery features across Apple's platforms, collaborating with engineers and researchers to push the boundaries of ML in production. The role requires advanced degrees and hands-on experience with generative AI, transformers, and ML frameworks.