Senior ML/IR Engineer - Real-Time Large-Scale Search

Apple Inc.; Cupertino, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 185,000 - 325,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple Inc. is seeking a Machine Learning/Search Engineer to design and optimize massive, low-latency search systems at scale in Cupertino. You will blend traditional keyword search with vector-based retrieval and build evaluation frameworks that guide real-time improvements.

You will collaborate with ML scientists, data engineers, and UX teams to deliver personalized search experiences and leverage latest AI breakthroughs for production-ready systems.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in ML, data science, or software engineering with a focus 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, augmentation and multi-stage ranking algorithms.
• Strong foundation in deep learning architectures for search, including transformers and learned representations.
• Experience with cloud environments (including AWS) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience deploying ML models and embeddings in production query paths; tuning for performance and quality.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain large-scale, low-latency search systems that scale.
• Develop and optimize ranking, relevance, and retrieval using ML/AI and vector-based search.
• Create NLP pipelines for intent classification, entity extraction, semantic parsing, and query expansion.
• Merge BM25 with vector-based semantic search using embeddings and vector databases.
• Develop multi-stage ranking and reranking algorithms to improve precision and recall.
• Establish offline/online evaluation, A/B testing, and continuous quality improvement for search.

Skills

Machine learning

Information retrieval

Search systems

Deep learning

Python

Go

Java

C++

Communication

Collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

PhD preferred

Tools

PyTorch

XGBoost

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

FAISS

Spark

TensorRT

Job description

Apple Inc. is seeking a Machine Learning/Search Engineer to design and optimize massive, low-latency search systems at scale in Cupertino. You will blend traditional keyword search with vector-based retrieval and build evaluation frameworks that guide real-time improvements.

You will collaborate with ML scientists, data engineers, and UX teams to deliver personalized search experiences and leverage latest AI breakthroughs for production-ready systems.