Sr Machine Learning Engineer - ML Data

Apple’s Ads Machine Learning Platform team builds secure, scalable back-end systems and ML products that help improve and scale advertising features while protecting user privacy. In this role, you’ll contribute to platform capabilities used for scalable modeling and continuous experimentation, partnering closely with ML engineers and scientists to deliver machine learning experiences that align with Apple’s privacy commitments.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop secure, scalable back-end systems.
• Build high-performing and elegant systems from the ground up.
• Collaborate with ML engineers and scientists to create platform capabilities that enable Ads teams to improve and scale ML features, models, and applications.
• Select technologies and develop solutions tailored to unique ad network challenges.
• Play a meaningful role building machine learning products that support Apple’s privacy commitments and change how advertising works with data.
• Contribute to reliability, simplicity, and scalability across systems and services.

Requirements

• Experience writing mission-critical production code for machine learning systems.
• Experience building ML infrastructure, frameworks, or services used by multiple teams.
• Experience building or operating feature stores or comparable ML data infrastructure serving production models.
• Experience with embedding management, including generating and versioning embeddings, refresh and retirement policy, and storing and serving for retrieval at scale.
• Solid understanding of the ML lifecycle: training, evaluation, deployment, and serving/inferencing, with experience building and deploying models.
• Understanding of model evaluation, train-serve skew, and data drift.
• Working knowledge of deep learning architectures and training frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Prior experience applying ML at scale in advertising, recommender systems, information retrieval, or related domains.
• Experience generating training data across multi-modal data (text, image, structured), including sampling and point-in-time correctness.
• Experience building production data pipelines for ML systems where scale and performance are critical using distributed processing systems.
• Experience building ML systems using batch and streaming deployments, workflow orchestration, and modern storage formats.
• Strong data modeling and data architecture skills, with a high bar for system and data quality: correctness, reliability, testing, and validation.
• Strong problem-solving, debugging, and performance tuning skills, with pride in automation, tooling, and CI/CD.
• Results-oriented approach with effective communication in written and verbal form across technical and non-technical multi-functional teams.
• Product-minded mindset with demonstrated ownership of projects.

Technologies

PyTorch, TensorFlow, LLM-based data generation or evaluation, agentic AI

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in the advertising industry.
• Experience with LLM-based data generation or evaluation.
• Familiarity with large-scale distributed training and its demands on data infrastructure.
• Prior experience in privacy-preserving ML.
• Familiarity with agentic AI.
• Academic background options: PhD in Computer Science or related field with 3+ years of engineering experience and 5+ years of machine learning experience; or MS in Computer Science or related field with 6+ years of engineering experience and 5+ years of machine learning experience; or BS in Computer Science or related field with 7+ years of engineering experience and 5+ years of machine learning experience.

Pay & Benefits

• Base pay range: USD 184,700 to 277,600 per year.
• Participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs.
• Eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards.
• Ability to purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in the Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
• Reimbursement for certain educational expenses, including tuition.
• Comprehensive medical and dental coverage.
• Retirement benefits.
• A range of discounted products and free services.
• Discretionary bonuses or commission payments and relocation may apply.
• Apple benefit, compensation, and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

Location: Cupertino, CA (onsite). Minimum experience: 3 years.