Senior Data Scientist - Special Projects

At Apple, this Senior Data Scientist role focuses on turning rich, multi-modal data into practical intelligence. You will analyze diverse datasets, build tools that support search, retrieval, interactive visualization, and evaluation, and help guide product and system performance across the full data lifecycle. The position is onsite in Cupertino, CA, with base pay ranging from $144,600 to $263,800 per year as part of Apple’s total compensation package.

What you’ll do

• Analyze diverse datasets to surface meaningful insights and create intuitive tools that help teams understand and improve the intelligence behind Apple products.
• Work across the full data lifecycle, including discovering signals in large-scale distributed logs.
• Build search and retrieval mechanisms that make data accessible for product and research workflows.
• Develop interactive visualizations and evaluations to support product direction and system performance.
• Design systems, infrastructure, and tools that enable next-generation AI-driven experiences, including on-device middleware and distributed inference platforms, as well as large-scale data pipelines, interactive analytics, and advanced developer tooling.
• Collaborate with hardware, robotics, ML, design, and platform teams to deliver end-to-end solutions that are performant, intuitive, and integrated into Apple’s ecosystem.

Core requirements

• 5+ years of experience in data science, analytics engineering, or applied research roles.
• Strong proficiency in Python and common data analysis libraries.
• Expertise with data visualization tools or frameworks for interactive dashboards.
• Experience querying and modeling data in SQL and NoSQL environments.
• Ability to analyze large-scale, high-dimensional, multi-modal datasets.
• Familiarity with designing or using search and retrieval systems for large-scale data.
• Experience designing KPIs, evaluation metrics, or experiment analyses for complex systems.
• Strong statistical intuition, including exploratory data analysis and hypothesis testing.
• Ability to translate complex findings into clear, actionable insights for cross-functional teams.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, or a related field.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience working with data from distributed or real-time systems, robotics, or multi-modal AI.
• Familiarity with information retrieval techniques such as ranking, embedding-based search, and relevance modeling.
• Experience partnering with ML teams on evaluation methodologies, dataset design, or model diagnostics.
• Knowledge of metadata management systems, cataloging, or data documentation strategies.
• Background in statistical modeling, time-series analysis, or anomaly detection.
• Experience with visualization frameworks for large datasets.
• Understanding of cloud-scale data processing and distributed compute frameworks.

Compensation and benefits

• Comprehensive medical and dental coverage.
• Retirement benefits.
• Discounted products and free services.
• Reimbursement for certain educational expenses, including tuition.
• Discretionary bonuses or commission payments, and relocation (if eligible).
• Opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs.
• Eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards.
• Can purchase Apple stock at a discount through the Employee Stock Purchase Plan (optional participation).

Tech stack

• Python
• SQL
• NoSQL