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This role pays more than
80%
of similar roles. Most pay
$197,687–$254,750
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At the midpoint, this role pays about
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versus about
$226k
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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
3497 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$174,149–$277,600
across 2702 roles with salary data.
The Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer, ACAI Training & Inference Platform joins the ACAI Training & Inference Platform team to build core capabilities for large-scale model training and high-performance inference. You will design scalable AI execution frameworks, developer-facing APIs, and runtime optimizations to support fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and post-training workflows. Key responsibilities include optimizing LLM serving for throughput and latency using techniques like continuous batching, quantization, and speculative decoding. You will utilize technologies including Python, C++, Rust, Go, Java, PyTorch, and Ray, while integrating engines like vLLM and SGLang. The role solves technical bottlenecks in model execution, scheduling, and resource utilization, translating complex model architectures into reliable, production-ready training and inference solutions across heterogeneous hardware and distributed systems.
What does a Machine Learning Engineer earn in California?
Median $235750 from 200 postings across 34 companies.
Design and build scalable distributed AI execution frameworks for large-scale model training and inference using Ray.
Develop high-level APIs, SDKs, and reusable workflows for supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and reinforcement learning.
Optimize LLM inference runtimes to improve throughput, reduce latency, and lower costs across diverse hardware configurations.
Drive deep runtime optimizations for GPU execution, memory management, kernel utilization, and distributed inference.
Evaluate and integrate modern inference and training engines like vLLM and SGLang into the AI platform.
Design distributed execution strategies for large models, including parallelism, workload placement, and resource allocation.
Improve system reliability through fault tolerance, checkpointing, workload recovery, and performance diagnostics.
Establish performance benchmarks to quantify improvements in training efficiency and inference cost per token.
What we're looking for
6+ years of experience building distributed systems, AI platforms, model execution frameworks, or high-performance software systems.
Hands-on experience in large-scale AI training, LLM post-training and reinforcement learning, or LLM inference and serving optimization.
Proficiency in Python and experience with a systems-level language such as C++, Rust, Go, or Java.
Experience with PyTorch and modern foundation model architectures, including the execution and performance requirements of large language models.
Understanding of distributed execution and parallelism strategies for large models, including data, tensor, pipeline, or expert parallelism.
Experience profiling and optimizing AI workloads across GPUs or other accelerators to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks.
Experience building APIs, SDKs, or reusable software components that simplify AI model development, training, adaptation, evaluation, or deployment.
Experience with Ray or comparable distributed execution frameworks, and familiarity with production-scale AI workloads.
B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field, or comparable software engineering experience.
Experience building end-to-end LLM post-training workflows, including SFT, preference optimization, RLHF, or RLVR (preferred).
Experience with distributed training and post-training frameworks such as Ray Train, TRL, VeRL, RLlib, DeepSpeed, FSDP, or equivalent technologies (preferred).
Experience designing developer-facing training APIs or services that support iterative experimentation, checkpointing, evaluation, and scalable model adaptation (preferred).
Deep understanding of LLM inference optimization, including continuous batching, KV-cache management, quantization, speculative decoding, prefix caching, and disaggregated prefill/decode (preferred).
Experience optimizing inference engines such as vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, or similar frameworks for latency, throughput, GPU utilization, and cost per token (preferred).
Experience with deep runtime optimization, including GPU kernels, memory allocation, graph execution, communication primitives, scheduling, and accelerator utilization (preferred).
Experience benchmarking and tuning inference workloads across model architectures, hardware configurations, concurrency levels, and latency targets (preferred).
Understanding of LLM serving architectures, including dynamic batching, autoscaling, multi-model serving, heterogeneous hardware, and workload-aware resource allocation (preferred).
Experience integrating training and inference engines into production AI platforms through stable APIs, reusable execution abstractions, and reliable operational workflows (preferred).
Contributions to open-source AI training, post-training, distributed execution, inference, or model-serving projects (preferred).
Familiarity with Ray Data, Spark, Flink, or similar data-processing technologies used in AI data preparation and training pipelines (preferred).
Experience operating AI workloads in production across cloud or on-premises accelerator environments, including Kubernetes or comparable execution systems (preferred).
Generative AI
LLM
PyTorch
Python
Machine Learning
RAG
Reinforcement Learning
Model Quantization
GPU Inference
Kernel Development
Data Processing
Multimodal Modeling
Python
Go
C++
Kubernetes
Ray
PyTorch
JAX
TensorFlow
vLLM
Pathways
GPU
TPU
Distributed Systems
Container Orchestration
Performance Engineering
Model Serving
Cloud Infrastructure
Machine Learning
Python
C++
C#
Java
JavaScript
C
Distributed Systems
System Design
Data Processing
Model Training
Inference
Production Deployment
Responsible AI