Senior ML Engineer - Ads Signals & Semantic Retrieval

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

Job summary

Apple Inc. in Cupertino, CA is seeking a hands-on Machine Learning Engineer for the Ads Signals Intelligence team.

You will build ML-driven signal platforms powering retrieval, prediction, and relevance across Apple’s advertising ecosystem, including App Store and Apple News. You will design content understanding systems, scale to real-time updates, and develop rich semantic signals from queries, creatives, metadata, and user interactions to support ad retrieval, ranking, and marketplace

Qualifications

• 4+ years in machine learning or applied research focusing on retrieval, ranking, NLP, or content understanding.
• Deep understanding of information retrieval, semantic search, and query-document matching.
• Hands-on experience with LLM fine-tuning, knowledge graphs, and entity-centric modeling.
• Experience with multimodal models (text, vision, metadata, or audio).
• Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Background in statistical modeling, optimization, and ML theory.
• Exposure to ad tech domains such as auction modeling, targeting, or attribution is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and scale ML systems that extract high-value semantic signals from structured and unstructured content.
• Contribute to retrieval and ranking pipelines using query understanding, semantic embedding, and dense/sparse indexing.
• Fine-tune and apply LLMs for NLP tasks like content labeling, rewriting, and semantic similarity.
• Construct and utilize knowledge graphs and entity linking systems for enriching signals.
• Work with multimodal data to build robust, cross-domain signal representations.
• Build core components for a content understanding platform, such as entity extraction and topic modeling.
• Own experimentation, offline evaluation, and online validation of signal pipelines at massive scale.
• Collaborate across engineering, infra, and product teams to productionize systems with high reliability and privacy.

Skills

Information retrieval

Semantic search

NLP with LLMs

Knowledge graphs

Entity linking

Multimodal models

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Statistical modeling

Optimization

ML theory

Ad tech exposure

Education

Bachelor's in CS / ML / IR / NLP

Tools

Hugging Face

Job description

Apple Inc. in Cupertino, CA is seeking a hands-on Machine Learning Engineer for the Ads Signals Intelligence team.

You will build ML-driven signal platforms powering retrieval, prediction, and relevance across Apple’s advertising ecosystem, including App Store and Apple News. You will design content understanding systems, scale to real-time updates, and develop rich semantic signals from queries, creatives, metadata, and user interactions to support ad retrieval, ranking, and marketplace