Senior Engineering Manager, AI Search & Retrieval, Services Special Projects

Apple Inc

Confirmed live yesterday High trust

Quick summary

Work type
On-site
Location
San Francisco, CA
Salary
$237,600–$401,700 / yr
Posted
41 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live yesterday

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $213k
This role $320k
$144k most similar roles pay here $429k

This role pays more than 95% of similar roles. Most pay $171,850–$254,750 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $320k versus about $213k 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 1984 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $175,000–$277,600 across 1590 roles with salary data.

Most-posted roles

View all roles at Apple Inc

At a glance

TL;DR · Senior Engineering Manager, AI Search & Retrieval, Services Special Projects

Senior Engineering Manager, AI Search & Retrieval - Services Special Projects serves as a technical authority and people leader for the search team. This role involves owning the architecture and long-term roadmap for large-scale, low-latency search infrastructure, including query understanding, hybrid retrieval, and ranking strategies like Learning to Rank and cross-encoder rerankers. The manager will oversee the development of generative AI features while ensuring safety guardrails against hallucinations and implementing privacy-preserving techniques. Key responsibilities include mentoring engineers, managing performance, and leading design reviews. Required skills include proficiency in Go, C++, Java, or Python, along with experience in ML frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch. The role requires expertise in vector databases, OpenSearch or Elasticsearch, and data processing via Spark or Flink to solve complex information retrieval problems involving high-volume structured and multimodal data.

What does a Engineering Manager earn in California?

Median $290250 from 64 postings across 19 companies.

See salary data

What you'll do

  • Own the architecture and long-term technical roadmap for large-scale, low-latency search infrastructure.
  • Lead query understanding, retrieval strategies, and ranking algorithms to improve search quality.
  • Establish offline evaluation frameworks and online A/B testing methodologies to validate search improvements.
  • Implement privacy-preserving techniques and safety guardrails to mitigate hallucinations in generative AI results.
  • Manage, mentor, and grow a team of engineers while overseeing their performance and career development.
  • Act as the primary technical voice in cross-functional design reviews with product and infrastructure teams.
  • Resolve high-risk technical problems including scaling bottlenecks and ranking regressions.
  • Recruit and hire senior and staff search engineers to build a high-performing engineering team.

What we're looking for

  • MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (PhD preferred).
  • 12+ years of experience in Machine Learning, Data Science, or Software Engineering with a focus on search infrastructure and information retrieval.
  • At least 5 years of experience in a technical leadership or engineering management capacity.
  • Proven experience managing engineers, including hiring, performance management, and mentoring senior and staff level ICs.
  • Experience designing large-scale search systems, ranking algorithms, and offline/online evaluation frameworks.
  • Proficiency with vector databases (Milvus, Qdrant, Pinecone, or FAISS) and search stacks like OpenSearch or Elasticsearch.
  • Proficiency in Go or C++ with working knowledge of Java or Python and ML frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch.
  • Experience with cloud environments (AWS/GCP), containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and large-scale data processing pipelines.

More like this

Similar roles

Machine Learning Search Engineer, Services Special Projects

Apple Inc

Cupertino, CA 43 days ago $184,700$324,800
Information Retrieval Generative AI Python Go Java C++ PyTorch XGBoost LLMs Vector Databases FAISS OpenSearch Elasticsearch Spark Flink Apache Kafka Docker Kubernetes AWS ONNX Runtime TensorRT vLLM Triton SGLang Cassandra MLflow DVC
10+ yrs exp

Senior Engineering Manager, Conversational AI & Knowledge Intelligence

Apple Inc

Santa Clara, CA 44 days ago $267,800$401,700
LLM RAG NLP Knowledge Graphs Vector Databases Machine Learning Distributed Systems Core ML RLHF RLAIF Information Retrieval Semantic Search Inference Optimization Knowledge Distillation Ranking Systems Content Understanding
8+ yrs exp