Job Details

Weekly Hours: 40

Role Number: 200636112-3337

Summary

The Apple Services Engineering (ASE) team is one of the most exciting examples of Apple’s long-held passion for combining art and technology. These are the people who power Search for the App Store, Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Apple Books. And they do it on a massive scale, meeting Apple’s high expectations with high performance to deliver a huge variety of entertainment in over 35 languages to more than 150 countries. These engineers build secure, end-to-end solutions. They develop the custom software used to process all the creative work, the tools that providers use to deliver that media, all the server-side systems, and the APIs for many Apple services.

Thanks to Apple’s unique integration of hardware, software, and services, engineers here partner to get behind a single unified vision. That vision always includes a deep commitment to strengthening Apple’s privacy policy, one of Apple’s core values. Although services are a bigger part of Apple’s business than ever before, these teams remain small, nimble, and cross-functional, offering greater exposure to the array of opportunities here.

Description

The ASE Search Research team sits at the intersection of cutting-edge research and production-scale impact. We follow state-of-the-art developments in machine learning, information retrieval, and natural language processing—then bring those innovations into Apple Services Search products used by hundreds of millions of people daily. We’re looking for engineers with strong research instincts who can identify promising techniques in the literature, adapt them to our unique challenges, and ship them at scale.

We power search for the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, Podcasts, Books, and more across iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, visionOS, and beyond. If you’re excited by the prospect of reading a new paper one week and seeing your implementation of its ideas serving customers the next, this role is for you.

Minimum Qualifications

• MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, or a related field

• 4+ years of relevant industry experience in search, ranking, recommendation systems, NLP, or related ML domains

• Strong publication record OR demonstrated experience bringing research ideas from literature into production systems

• Deep understanding of search and information retrieval fundamentals including indexing, query understanding, retrieval, and ranking

• Proficiency with modern ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX)

• Experience with Transformers, large language models, and neural retrieval/ranking approaches

• Strong programming skills in Python; working knowledge of at least one high-performance language (Go, C++, Rust, or similar)

• Demonstrated ability to read, understand, and implement techniques from academic papers

Preferred Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, NLP, or a related field

• Publications at top venues (e.g., SIGIR, ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, WWW, WSDM)

• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, dense retrieval, or learned sparse retrieval

• Familiarity with reinforcement learning, especially in ranking or recommendation contexts

• Experience building big data pipelines with Hadoop, Spark, or similar technologies

• Experience leading technical aspects of complex multi-functional projects

• Track record of successful research-to-production transitions

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 (https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/2023-06/22-088_EEOC_KnowYourRights6.12ScreenRdr.pdf) .