On-Device Multimodal Foundation Models Scientist

Apple, Inc.; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 278,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical and dental coverage

Education reimbursement

Employee stock programs

Job summary

Apple Inc. in Sunnyvale is seeking an AI Research Scientist to advance multimodal foundation models, focusing on architecture, pre-training, and distillation for on-device intelligence.

You will shape research directions, run ambitious experiments, and translate breakthroughs into practical Apple assets across devices and ecosystems. The role emphasizes scalable experimentation, cross-disciplinary collaboration across model research, data, systems, and hardware boundaries, with potential

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience designing, implementing, and running large-scale pre-training experiments for large language models.
• Experience with LLM pre-training topics such as model architecture, training objectives, data mixtures, tokenization, curricula, scaling, and optimization.
• Strong proficiency with modern deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX and distributed training systems.
• Experience evaluating pre-trained models across language understanding, reasoning, instruction following, or multimodal capabilities.
• Strong understanding of transformer-based architectures and current approaches to efficient or scalable foundation-model training.
• Master’s degree, or equivalent practical experience in machine learning, computer science, or a related technical field.

Responsibilities

• Investigate foundation-model architectures, pre-training objectives, and distillation techniques.
• Develop and evaluate model architectures, data strategies, optimization methods, and teacher–student learning approaches.
• Explore transfer of capabilities to smaller, efficient models for on-device deployment, while accounting for memory and energy constraints.

Skills

LLM pre-training

Transformer architectures

Distributed training

Multimodal understanding

Education

Master’s degree in ML/CS

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

Apple Inc. in Sunnyvale is seeking an AI Research Scientist to advance multimodal foundation models, focusing on architecture, pre-training, and distillation for on-device intelligence.

You will shape research directions, run ambitious experiments, and translate breakthroughs into practical Apple assets across devices and ecosystems. The role emphasizes scalable experimentation, cross-disciplinary collaboration across model research, data, systems, and hardware boundaries, with potential