Senior AI-Powered Search Systems Engineer

Apple, Inc.; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 185,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical and dental coverage

Stock options program

Tuition reimbursement

Job summary

Apple seeks a highly experienced Search Systems Engineer to design, develop, and optimize large-scale, real-time search systems at scale. You will work at the intersection of Generative AI and Information Retrieval, partnering with AI/ML scientists and engineers to craft intelligent systems that personalize user experiences.

The role emphasizes building robust ranking, retrieval, and multi-stage reranking models, plus offline/online evaluation and A/B testing to continuously improve search

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in CS/ML/Stats or related field
• 10+ years of experience focusing on search infrastructure and information retrieval
• Hands-on experience building and deploying large-scale search systems in production
• Deep understanding of information retrieval, query understanding, and multi-stage ranking algorithms
• Strong foundation in deep learning architectures for search (transformers, cross encoders)
• Experience with multi-objective optimization in search (relevance, diversity, freshness)
• Experience with real-time systems, user feedback loops, and model retraining pipelines
• Proficiency in Go, Java, C++, and Python
• Familiarity with AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Spark, Flink
• Hands-on experience with vector search (FAISS) and OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain large-scale, low-latency search systems
• Develop and optimize ranking and retrieval using ML/AI models
• Merge traditional keyword search with vector-based semantic search
• Develop NLP pipelines for intent classification and entity extraction
• Implement learning-to-rank and multi-stage reranking
• Build offline/online evaluation metrics and A/B frameworks
• Collaborate with researchers, data engineers, and product teams
• Stay current with search IR research and translate to production systems

Skills

Go

Java

C++

Python

ML/DL knowledge

Search infrastructure

Reinforcement to vector search

Real-time systems

Distributed systems

Communication

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/ML/Statistics

Tools

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

FAISS

PyTorch

TensorRT

Kubernetes

Docker

KV stores (Cassandra/SSTables)

Kafka

Job description

Apple seeks a highly experienced Search Systems Engineer to design, develop, and optimize large-scale, real-time search systems at scale. You will work at the intersection of Generative AI and Information Retrieval, partnering with AI/ML scientists and engineers to craft intelligent systems that personalize user experiences.

The role emphasizes building robust ranking, retrieval, and multi-stage reranking models, plus offline/online evaluation and A/B testing to continuously improve search