Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer, ACAI Training & Inference Platform

Apple Inc

Confirmed live today High trust

Quick summary

Work type
On-site
Location
Cupertino, CA
Salary
$184,700–$324,800 / yr
Posted
1 day ago
Freshness
Confirmed live today

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $226k
This role $255k
$167k $342k
below market most similar roles pay here above market

This role pays more than 81% of similar roles. Most pay $198,000–$254,750 — the blue band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $255k versus about $226k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

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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 3515 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $174,149–$277,600 across 2718 roles with salary data.

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At a glance

TL;DR · Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer, ACAI Training & Inference Platform

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. Your daily work involves developing frameworks for supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization while driving deep runtime optimizations like continuous batching, KV-cache management, and quantization to improve throughput and reduce latency. You will utilize technologies including Python, C++, Rust, Go, Java, PyTorch, Ray, vLLM, and SGLang. The role solves the technical challenge of efficiently training, adapting, and serving advanced models across heterogeneous hardware by optimizing GPU execution, memory management, and distributed communication strategies.

What does a Machine Learning Engineer earn in California?

Median $235750 from 201 postings across 34 companies.

See salary data

What you'll do

  • 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 execution capabilities.
  • 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).
  • 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 (preferred).
  • Experience with deep runtime optimization, including GPU kernels, memory allocation, graph execution, communication primitives, scheduling, and accelerator utilization (preferred).
  • Experience operating AI workloads in production across cloud or on-premises accelerator environments, including Kubernetes or comparable execution systems (preferred).

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