Senior Multimodal LLM Researcher (Post-Training)

Apple, Inc.; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 309,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive medical and dental.cover

Retirement benefits

Employee stock programs (RSUs)

Job summary

Apple seeks a Senior ML Researcher in Seattle to advance foundation model post-training, including SFT and RL, with a focus on instruction following, tool use, deep thinking, and reasoning. You will collaborate across research, engineering, and product teams to ship capabilities that enhance millions of creators through Apple’s human-centered design.

The role emphasizes real-world use cases in multimodal AI, with opportunities in video understanding, reasoning, and agentic tasks.

Qualifications

• MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Minimum 4+ years of research experience in Multi-Modal LLM training and evaluation.
• Proven track record in multimodal SFT plus distillation, preference optimization, or online RL with shipped models or rigorous experiments.
• Strong programming skills in Python and at least one deep learning framework such as JAX or PyTorch.

Responsibilities

• Research, design, and deliver models where machine learning research meets real-world product impact.
• Collaborate with research scientists, engineers, and product teams to integrate generative AI into Apple's products.
• Formulate hypotheses, define data collection and annotation, and build evaluations of model capabilities.
• Apply SFT, advanced reward modeling, RL techniques, and distillation to develop the post-training recipe.

Skills

Python

JAX

PyTorch

Multimodal LLM

RL

Education

MS in Computer Science, ML, or related field

PhD in CS/ML or related field (preferred)

Tools

JAX

PyTorch

Job description

Apple seeks a Senior ML Researcher in Seattle to advance foundation model post-training, including SFT and RL, with a focus on instruction following, tool use, deep thinking, and reasoning. You will collaborate across research, engineering, and product teams to ship capabilities that enhance millions of creators through Apple’s human-centered design.

The role emphasizes real-world use cases in multimodal AI, with opportunities in video understanding, reasoning, and agentic tasks.