Senior AI-Powered Search Systems Engineer

Apple; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple is seeking a highly experienced Search Systems Engineer to design and optimize large-scale, low-latency search systems. You will bridge traditional keyword search with vector-based semantic search and build ML-driven ranking pipelines.

You will collaborate with AI/ML scientists, data engineers, MLOps, and UX teams to deploy, evaluate, and tune models in production, ensuring high quality search at scale for millions of users.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's in CS/ML/Statistics or related field.
• 10+ years in ML/DS or software roles with focus on search infra.
• Hands-on experience building large-scale search in production.
• Deep understanding of IR, query understanding, multi-stage ranking.
• Strong background in DL for search (transformers, cross-encoders, GNNs, learned representations).
• Experience with multi-objective optimization (relevance, diversity, freshness).
• Real-time systems, feedback loops, retraining pipelines.
• Proficiency in Go, Java, C++, Python.
• Experience with PyTorch, XGBoost; cloud (AWS); containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Big-data pipelines (Spark, Flink) and vector search (FAISS).
• Streaming platforms (Kafka).
• Search infra (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch).
• Production deployment of LLMs, embeddings, and ML models; tuning incl. quantization.
• Excellent communication and collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain large-scale, low-latency search systems.
• Blend keyword search with vector-based semantic search using embeddings.
• Develop NLP pipelines for intent, entity extraction, parsing, and query expansion.
• Implement ranking and multi-stage reranking models to optimize precision and recall.
• Create offline/online evaluation, A/B tests, and continuous quality improvements.
• Collaborate with researchers, product, data eng, MLOps, and UX to align features with goals.
• Stay up-to-date with IR research and translate into scalable production systems.

Skills

Go

Java

C++

Python

Machine Learning

Information Retrieval

Search Systems

Transformer Models

Learning to Rank

Vector Search

Go-to-Mold ML Ops

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/ML/Stats

Master's or PhD preferred

Tools

PyTorch

XGBoost

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

FAISS

TensorRT

ONNX Runtime

Kubernetes

Docker

Spark/Flink

KV Stores (SSTables, Cassandra)

Git & MLflow / Weights & Biases

Job description

Apple is seeking a highly experienced Search Systems Engineer to design and optimize large-scale, low-latency search systems. You will bridge traditional keyword search with vector-based semantic search and build ML-driven ranking pipelines.

You will collaborate with AI/ML scientists, data engineers, MLOps, and UX teams to deploy, evaluate, and tune models in production, ensuring high quality search at scale for millions of users.