Senior Multimodal LLM Researcher — Post-Training & RL

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

Benefits offered by this job

Apple Benefits

Relocation assistance

Stock options

Job summary

Apple Inc. in Cupertino, CA is seeking a Senior ML Researcher focused on foundation model post-training, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL).

You will work with research scientists, engineers and product teams to advance multimodal models that enhance creative workflows for millions of users. The role emphasizes shaping post-training strategies across data collection, evaluation, and algorithmic improvements, while aligning with Apple's human-centered design

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, reward optimization, or online RL, backed by shipped models or rigorous experiments.

Responsibilities

• Formulate hypotheses for a use case.
• Define data collection and annotation.
• Build evaluations of model capabilities.
• Apply SFT, reward modeling, RL techniques, and distillation to develop the post-training recipe.
• Execute experiments, validate results and communicate findings to the broader team.

Skills

Python

Deep learning

Education

MS in Computer Science or related field

PhD preferred

Tools

JAX

PyTorch

Job description

Apple Inc. in Cupertino, CA is seeking a Senior ML Researcher focused on foundation model post-training, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL).

You will work with research scientists, engineers and product teams to advance multimodal models that enhance creative workflows for millions of users. The role emphasizes shaping post-training strategies across data collection, evaluation, and algorithmic improvements, while aligning with Apple's human-centered design