Senior Search Systems Engineer, Real-Time AI & IR at Scale

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

Job summary

Apple Inc. seeks an experienced Search Systems Engineer to design, build, and optimize real-time search systems at scale, blending traditional keyword methods with vector-based semantic search.

You will collaborate with AI/ML scientists to deliver low-latency, high-quality results for a massive user base. You will lead ML-driven ranking, retrieval, and multi-stage reranking pipelines, while advancing NLP pipelines for intent classification, entity extraction, and query expansion.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in ML, data science, or software engineering with a focus on search.
• Hands-on experience building large-scale search systems in production.
• Deep understanding of information retrieval, query understanding, and multi-stage ranking.
• Strong knowledge of DL architectures for search including transformers and cross-encoders.
• Experience with multi-objective optimization in search systems (relevance, diversity, freshness, fairness).
• Experience with real-time systems, user feedback loops, and model retraining pipelines.
• Proficiency in Go, Java, C++, and Python.
• Experience with AWS and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with vector search (FAISS) and OpenSearch/Elasticsearch.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain large-scale, low-latency search systems that can scale.
• Develop and optimize ranking and retrieval through ML/AI models and merging keyword search with vector-based semantic search.
• Develop NLP pipelines for intent classification, entity extraction, semantic parsing, and query expansion.
• Merge traditional keyword search (BM25) with vector-based semantic search using embeddings and vector databases.
• Design and implement learning-to-rank and multi-stage reranking models to optimize precision and recall.
• Build offline and online evaluation metrics, A/B testing frameworks, and continuous improvement strategies for search quality.
• Partner with Research Scientists, Product, Data Engineering, MLOps, Search Infrastructure, and UX teams.
• Stay current with latest research and translate into scalable production systems.

Skills

Go

Java

C++

Python

PyTorch

XGBoost

OpenSearch

Elasticsearch

Kubernetes

Docker

Spark

Flink

FAISS

ONNX Runtime

TensorRT

TorchServe

Kafka

TigerGraph

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PyTorch

XGBoost

OpenSearch

Elasticsearch

Kafka

Kubernetes

Docker

Spark

Flink

FAISS

ONNX Runtime

TensorRT

Job description

Apple Inc. seeks an experienced Search Systems Engineer to design, build, and optimize real-time search systems at scale, blending traditional keyword methods with vector-based semantic search.

You will collaborate with AI/ML scientists to deliver low-latency, high-quality results for a massive user base. You will lead ML-driven ranking, retrieval, and multi-stage reranking pipelines, while advancing NLP pipelines for intent classification, entity extraction, and query expansion.