Senior Software Development Engineer in Test, LLM Evaluation & Automation

Apple Inc

Confirmed live yesterday High trust

Quick summary

Work type
On-site
Location
Cupertino, CA
Salary
$184,700–$324,800 / yr
Posted
38 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live yesterday

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $176k
This role $255k
$106k most similar roles pay here $348k

This role pays more than 98% of similar roles. Most pay $149,500–$202,800 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $255k versus about $176k 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.

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At a glance

TL;DR · Senior Software Development Engineer in Test, LLM Evaluation & Automation

Senior Software Development Engineer in Test — LLM Evaluation & Automation, T3E joins the Apple Intelligence Platform Experience Validation team to lead automated model evaluation as a core discipline. This individual contributor role focuses on building infrastructure and tooling to catch model regressions before they reach human evaluation or live populations. You will design and maintain LLM-as-a-judge evaluation harnesses, curate eval sets and rubrics, and develop test coverage ranging from low-level components to end-to-end user flows for generative features like image and natural-language generation. The role requires proficiency in Python, data pipelines, REST APIs, SQL, and Xcode. You will collaborate with modeling and infrastructure teams to ensure model quality is a measurable signal. Key technical focuses include evaluating content for intent alignment, detecting behavior regressions, and managing large datasets while addressing bias and fairness considerations.

What does a Software Development Engineer in Test earn in California?

Median $208400 from 30 postings across 6 companies.

See salary data

What you'll do

  • Design and maintain LLM-as-a-judge evaluation harnesses integrated into CI and automation pipelines.
  • Author and curate evaluation sets and rubrics to judge model outputs at scale.
  • Triage large-scale evaluation results to distinguish actual model regressions from infrastructure noise.
  • Build test coverage ranging from low-level component tests to full end-to-end user flows.
  • Develop reusable libraries and tools for evaluation tasks that other engineering teams can adopt.
  • Define quality gates and reporting systems to catch regressions before human evaluation or public release.
  • Create automated systems to evaluate image generation, natural language responses, and summarized content.

What we're looking for

  • Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
  • Three years of relevant industry experience in test automation, software development, or related areas.
  • Proficiency in Python including data-pipeline fluency with JSON, YAML, and REST APIs.
  • Experience with LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, rubric design, and generative model behavior (image/NLP).
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals to build maintainable pipelines and reusable libraries rather than just scripts.
  • Expertise in the software development lifecycle, testing methodologies, and QA processes.
  • Ability to triage results, distinguish regressions from noise, and communicate quality signals to leadership.
  • Experience with CI/CD integration, job orchestration systems, and database/query tooling like SQL.

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