Senior Engineering Manager, Conversational AI & Knowledge Intelligence

Apple Inc.; Santa Clara, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 268,000 - 402,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical and dental

Retirement benefits

Stock options

Tuition reimbursement

Job summary

Apple Inc. is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Conversational AI and Knowledge Intelligence platform. You will guide a world-class team building scalable systems for RAG, knowledge grounding, and on-device/server-side retrieval across Siri, Spotlight, and Apple Intelligence.

You will mentor senior engineering leaders, define multi-year roadmaps, and drive technical excellence at Apple’s scale, ensuring trusted and high-quality AI experiences for billions of users.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in CS or related technical field.
• 8+ years of experience leading large‑scale AI teams delivering production AI products.
• Deep experience with LLMs, RAG, NLP, and distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Define vision, architecture, and execution strategy for Conversational AI and Knowledge Intelligence.
• Lead end-to-end engineering and research spanning RAG, world knowledge understanding, and LLM inference optimization.
• Develop scalable knowledge pipelines to curate and distill information for large language models.
• Collaborate across Siri, Apple Intelligence, Safari, Spotlight, and Product teams to deliver AI experiences.

Skills

AI leadership

LLMs

NLP

Information retrieval

Distributed systems

Knowledge graphs

Education

MS or PhD in CS

Job description

Santa Clara, California, United States Machine Learning and AI

Apple is where individual imaginations gather together, contributing to the values that lead to great work. Every new idea has the potential to become an extraordinary product, service, or customer experience. The AI, Search & Knowledge Platforms team builds the foundational intelligence powering Apple's most iconic experiences, including Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Apple Intelligence, and many other applications across the Apple ecosystem.

Description

We are seeking an exceptional Senior Engineering Manager to lead the engineering organization responsible for Conversational AI, World Knowledge Question Answering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and Knowledge Intelligence. This team develops the next generation of AI-powered experiences that enable billions of users worldwide to ask questions naturally and receive accurate, grounded, personalized, and delightful answers. You will lead a world-class team of machine learning engineers, software engineers, data engineers, and applied scientists building scalable knowledge systems, LLM-powered reasoning capabilities, retrieval infrastructure, and knowledge generation platforms that continuously improve the quality, freshness, and intelligence of Apple's conversational experiences.

Responsibilities

• In this role, you will define the vision, architecture, and execution strategy for Apple's Conversational AI and Knowledge Intelligence platform powering Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Apple Intelligence, and future AI experiences across the Apple ecosystem.
• You will lead end-to-end engineering and research efforts spanning large-scale Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), world knowledge understanding, conversational reasoning, knowledge generation and distillation, answer grounding, ranking, experience enrichment, and LLM inference optimization. Your organization will build intelligent systems that combine Apple's proprietary knowledge graph, trusted web content, structured and unstructured knowledge, and state-of-the-art foundation models to deliver highly accurate, context-aware, and trustworthy answers.
• You will drive the development of scalable knowledge pipelines that continuously acquire, curate, synthesize, validate, and distill information from diverse sources into high-quality knowledge assets consumable by large language models and downstream experiences. You will partner closely with foundation model teams to improve retrieval quality, reasoning, grounding, hallucination mitigation, citation generation, answer completeness, factual consistency, and user trust.
• You will lead the development of sophisticated on-device and server-side software frameworks that enable low-latency, privacy-preserving, and cost-efficient retrieval, orchestration, and LLM inference across Apple's Private Cloud Compute infrastructure and Apple silicon devices.
• You will collaborate across Siri, Apple Intelligence, Safari, Spotlight, Search, Foundation Models, Core ML, Human Interface, Privacy, and Product organizations to deliver seamless AI-powered experiences that delight users around the world.
• As a senior leader, you will build and mentor high-performing engineering managers and technical leaders, establish technical strategy and organizational direction, foster engineering excellence, and execute ambitious multi-year roadmaps while delivering high-quality products at Apple's scale.

Minimum Qualifications

• MS or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of experience leading large-scale engineering and machine learning organizations delivering AI-powered products in production.
• Deep experience building conversational AI, search, question answering, knowledge systems, recommendation systems, or large-scale information retrieval platforms.
• Strong technical expertise in large language models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), NLP, and distributed systems.
• Demonstrated ability to define long-term technical strategy while successfully executing complex cross-functional programs involving multiple engineering organizations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep expertise in modern LLM architectures, agentic AI, retrieval systems, semantic search, vector databases, embedding models, knowledge graphs, and multi-stage retrieval and ranking systems.
• Strong engineering and R&D experience in LLM post-training, reinforcement learning for language models (RLHF, RLAIF), reward modeling, policy optimization, model alignment, grounding, hallucination reduction, factuality improvement, and production deployment of large-scale AI systems.
• Experience building large-scale knowledge generation, knowledge distillation, content understanding, and knowledge enrichment pipelines that continuously improve AI quality and freshness.
• Strong product vision with the ability to translate emerging AI technologies into impactful customer experiences across consumer products.
• Outstanding leadership, organizational, and communication skills with demonstrated success influencing senior executives and driving alignment across multiple organizations.
• Passion for building inclusive, high-performing engineering teams and fostering a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and continuous learning.

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 $267,800 and $401,700, 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

At Apple, we believe accessibility is a fundamental human right. You'll find that idea reflected in everything here - in our culture, our benefits and our digital tools. By welcoming as many perspectives as possible, we help you build a career where you feel like you belong.

Learn about accessibility in Apple's workplace

Learn about reasonable accommodations for job applicants

Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.