Sr. Machine Learning Manager, AI, Search & Knowledge Platforms

Apple; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple in Santa Clara, CA seeks a seasoned Engineering Manager to build and lead a backend infra and ML engineering team. You will own the technical roadmap for large-scale indexing and serving systems and drive execution against ambitious scale, reliability, latency, and cost targets.

You will partner across quality, infra, and product teams to prioritize what gets built, growing a high-performing team while shaping architecture for billions of documents and real-time pipelines powering search

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience leading and driving complex, large scale search infrastructure projects.
• Experience managing managers and engineering teams, including hiring, growth, and performance management.
• BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related field.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a backend infra and ML engineering team.
• Own the technical roadmap for large-scale indexing and serving systems.
• Drive execution against scale, reliability, latency, and cost targets.
• Partner across quality, infra, and product teams to prioritize what gets built.

Skills

Web-scale indexing

Distributed systems

Algorithms

Data structures

Staff management

Hiring & growth

Education

BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science

Job description

Summary

Do you want to make Apple products more intelligent for our users? The Search & Recommendation Platforms team is building groundbreaking core infrastructure technology for an AI powered, large scale, highly performant agentic search serving stack. This platform powers search and recommendation experiences across Siri, Safari, Spotlight, App Store, Apple Music, and other Apple products. We are looking for a seasoned Engineering Manager who will build and lead a team of backend infrastructure and ML engineers, own the technical roadmap for large scale indexing and serving systems, and drive execution against aggressive scale, reliability, latency, and cost targets.

Description

We design and build the core infrastructure that indexes and serves billions of documents to find and return the best content to users at query time, with high throughput and low latency. This infrastructure underpins LLM powered and agentic search, spanning indexing, semantic and multimodal retrieval, query understanding, model inference, and agentic orchestration. This role's focus is indexing and serving specifically. As the manager of this team, you will set technical direction, grow and develop your team, and partner across quality, infra, and product teams to prioritize what gets built. You will have the opportunity to lead work spanning hundreds of billions of documents, petabytes of data, and real time evaluation pipelines.

Minimum Qualifications

• Deep expertise in web scale indexing systems, including distributed document processing, storage, and retrieval
• Strong coding skills and background in algorithms and data structures
• 10+ years of experience leading and driving complex, large scale search infrastructure projects
• Experience managing managers and engineering teams, including hiring, growth, and performance management
• Track record scaling engineering teams across multiple sites/geographies
• Strong technical judgment and ability to drive architecture, execution, and cross functional alignment across complex programs spanning multiple teams
• BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related field

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing evaluation infrastructure for large scale indexing and retrieval systems
• Experience with RAG and agentic search scenarios
• Track record of driving developer velocity and quality improvements across large engineering organizations
• Familiarity with LLM model inference, and search quality metrics