Senior ML Engineer - Local Info Search & NLP

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical & Dental

Retirement benefits

Discounted products and services

Educational reimbursement

Bonuses or commissions

Job summary

Apple in Santa Clara, CA is seeking an experienced ML/IR professional to own end-to-end ML development for search quality across retrieval, ranking, and query understanding. You will lead model development and experiment design, mentoring engineers while translating product needs into actionable ML tasks.

The role requires 5+ years in IR/NLP/ML, a strong ML foundation, and a Master’s in CS or equivalent. A supportive environment, generous benefits, and relocation are provided.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, or deep learning.
• Deep understanding of ML theory, including supervised learning, ranking models, embeddings, representation learning, and evaluation metrics.
• Proven ability to apply advanced ML techniques to improve search relevance and retrieval quality at scale.
• Comfortable leading experimentation, offline evaluation, and online A/B testing for iterative improvements in search quality.
• Excellent interpersonal skills; able to work independently or in a team.
• Master’s Degree in Computer Science or equivalent ML related field.

Responsibilities

• Own the entire ML development cycle from opportunity analysis, exploration, and prototyping to data collection, feature engineering, training, evaluation, and deployment in production.
• Lead the development of machine learning models to improve search quality across retrieval, ranking, reranking, and query understanding.
• Improve search quality and experience using learning-to-rank, embedding models, contrastive learning, multi-task learning, and reinforcement learning where appropriate.
• Mentor junior engineers and provide technical leadership in architecting ML systems and modeling tasks.
• Translate product requirements into modeling and engineering tasks.

Skills

Information retrieval

NLP

Machine learning theory

A/B testing

Leadership

Education

Masters in CS

Job description

Apple in Santa Clara, CA is seeking an experienced ML/IR professional to own end-to-end ML development for search quality across retrieval, ranking, and query understanding. You will lead model development and experiment design, mentoring engineers while translating product needs into actionable ML tasks.

The role requires 5+ years in IR/NLP/ML, a strong ML foundation, and a Master’s in CS or equivalent. A supportive environment, generous benefits, and relocation are provided.