The Apple Services Engineering (ASE) team is looking to solve the problem of powering search for various Apple services such as App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Podcasts, and Apple Books, on a massive scale, meeting Apple's high expectations with high performance, while strengthening Apple's privacy policy.
Requirements
- 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
- Proficiency with modern ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX)
- Experience with Transformers, large language models, and neural retrieval/ranking approaches
Responsibilities
- Stay current with academic research in search, retrieval, NLP, and machine learning; identify techniques with potential to improve Apple Services Search
- Prototype and evaluate novel approaches, running rigorous offline experiments to validate hypotheses before production investment
- Think through complex research problems, simplify where necessary, and invent when needed to drive a principled vision from thought to reality
- Present key technical and novel research work in internal and external public forums, including potential publications at top-tier venues
- Translate research prototypes into production-quality systems that serve customers at scale
- Design and conduct A/B tests to objectively measure improvements and ensure successful deployment of features, code, data, and models to production
- Collaborate with world-class engineers, researchers, and statisticians to ensure that features and models perform at or above expected levels
Other
- 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
- Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity
- Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant
