Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Data and ML Innovation

Apple Inc

Confirmed live yesterday High trust

Quick summary

Work type
On-site
Location
Cupertino, CA
Salary
$150,400–$277,600 / yr
Posted
2 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live yesterday

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Salary context

Competitive pay

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $233k
This role $214k
$134k most similar roles pay here $306k

This role pays less than 65% of similar roles. Most pay $211,200–$254,750 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $214k versus about $233k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Apple Inc

Apple Inc. is a multinational technology company known for designing and manufacturing consumer electronics, software, and online services, including the iPhone, Mac, iPad, and App Store. Industry: Consumer Electronics & Software

Apple Inc currently has 2305 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $175,000–$280,000 across 1873 roles with salary data.

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At a glance

TL;DR · Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Data and ML Innovation

As a Sr Machine Learning Engineer within the Data and ML Innovation team, you will contribute to the development of large language models and agentic systems. You will drive model hillclimbing through systematic experimentation, including dataset curation, hyperparameter tuning, and ablation studies to improve training and evaluation efficiency. Your daily work involves designing and implementing large-scale pretraining and post-training pipelines, such as supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization. Additionally, you will build data pipelines for filtering and labeling, develop reward systems for model alignment, and construct agent training environments including tool APIs and sandboxed runtimes. The role requires expertise in LLM training workflows, distributed frameworks, and reinforcement learning infrastructure. You will solve complex problems regarding model quality and performance by bridging the gap between research, infrastructure, and product to power advanced features like Apple Intelligence.

What does a Machine Learning Engineer earn in California?

Median $246150 from 187 postings across 29 companies.

See salary data

What you'll do

  • Design and implement large-scale LLM pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and preference optimization pipelines.
  • Drive model hillclimbing through systematic experimentation including dataset curation, hyperparameter tuning, and ablation studies.
  • Develop evaluation frameworks for offline benchmarks and online metrics covering reasoning and tool use.
  • Design and maintain verifiers and rubric-based reward systems for agentic tasks and model alignment.
  • Build data pipelines for automated data generation, filtering, labeling, and replay buffers.
  • Build and maintain agent training environments including tool APIs, simulators, and sandboxed runtimes.
  • Implement environment abstractions to support reinforcement learning and large-scale agent evaluation.
  • Develop scalable training workflows using distributed frameworks and containerized RL infrastructure.

What we're looking for

  • Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).
  • 5+ years of hands-on machine learning engineering experience.
  • At least 1 year of experience working directly on large language models or generative AI.
  • Hands-on experience with LLM training workflows including pretraining, SFT, and preference optimization like RLHF, DPO, or PPO.
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals including debugging, testing, code reviews, and production reliability.
  • Demonstrated publication records in relevant conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR.
  • Experience with agentic systems, tool use, environment design, or reinforcement learning (preferred).
  • Experience building training environments, simulators, or model hillclimbing workflows (preferred).

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