Staff / Sr. ML Engineer, Indexing Infrastructure

Apple; California; On-site; USD 216,000 - 325,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple in Santa Clara, California is seeking a seasoned distributed systems engineer to help build the storage and compute foundation behind trillions of records and petabytes of data across Siri, Spotlight, and more.

You will design a petabyte-scale web signal store, a MapReduce-style processing framework on Kubernetes, and own production health with on-call duties. This role offers the opportunity to impact multiple Apple products and services at scale.

Qualifications

• Strong CS background in algorithms and distributed systems.
• 5+ years designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with petabyte-scale batch data processing (MapReduce, Spark, or similar).
• Proficiency in cloud-native architectures and compute orchestration on AWS (S3, EC2, EKS) and Kubernetes.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, with the ability to work independently and drive cross-team efforts.

Responsibilities

• Design and build our web signal store, a petabyte-scale Parquet/Iceberg lakehouse holding trillions of web documents and signals.
• Design and build our in-house MapReduce-style processing framework, which runs thousands of workers on Kubernetes.
• Improve performance, reliability, and cost at trillion-row scale, from read/write throughput and compaction to fault-tolerant batch jobs on shared clusters.
• Own production health, including monitoring, on-call, and root-cause fixes, and raise the engineering bar through design and code reviews.

Skills

Distributed systems

Coding skills

Large-scale data processing

Cloud/Kubernetes

Interpersonal skills

Education

MS or PhD in Computer Science

Tools

MapReduce

Spark

AWS

Kubernetes

Job description

Santa Clara, California, United States Machine Learning and AI

Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, great ideas have a way of becoming great products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. Bring passion and dedication to your job and there's no telling what you could accomplish.Do you want to make Siri and Apple products smarter for our users? The MLPT & Infra teams are building groundbreaking technology for algorithmic search, machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence. Our universal search engine powers search features across a variety of Apple products, including Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Messages and Lookup.

Description

As part of this group, you will build the storage and compute foundation behind one of the most exciting high-performance computing environments: trillions of records, petabytes of data, and the systems that turn them into search and Apple Intelligence experiences that delight our customers every day.

Responsibilities

• Design and build our web signal store, a petabyte-scale Parquet/Iceberg lakehouse holding trillions of web documents and signals.
• Design and build our in-house MapReduce-style processing framework, which runs thousands of workers on Kubernetes.
• Improve performance, reliability, and cost at trillion-row scale, from read/write throughput and compaction to fault-tolerant batch jobs on shared clusters.
• Own production health, including monitoring, on-call, and root-cause fixes, and raise the engineering bar through design and code reviews.

Minimum Qualifications

• Strong coding skills and a solid computer science background in algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems
• 5+ years experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems such as databases, storage platforms, or data processing frameworks
• Hands-on experience with petabyte-scale batch data processing (MapReduce, Spark, or similar)
• Proficiency in cloud-native architectures and compute orchestration on AWS (S3, EC2, EKS) and Kubernetes
• Excellent interpersonal skills, with the ability to work independently and drive cross-team efforts
• MS or PhD in Computer Science or related field

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep familiarity with columnar and lakehouse formats (Parquet, Iceberg), and the judgment to choose between them at scale
• Experience with storage internals: compaction, metadata and manifest management, indexing, and query performance tuning
• Experience with workflow orchestration (e.g., Argo) and resource scheduling on shared Kubernetes clusters
• Experience with key-value or online serving stores (e.g., Bigtable, HBase, Cassandra) and multi-cloud data movement
• Experience with search indexing, machine learning, or NLP is a plus

At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $216,200 and $324,800, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.

Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs. Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan. You’ll also receive benefits including: Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation. Learn more about Apple Benefits

Note: Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant

At Apple, we believe accessibility is a fundamental human right. You’ll find that idea reflected in everything here — in our culture, our benefits and our digital tools. By welcoming as many perspectives as possible, we help you build a career where you feel like you belong.

Learn about accessibility in Apple’s workplace

Learn about reasonable accommodations for job applicants

Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.