Senior Staff / Distinguished Engineer

Apple Inc

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Quick summary

Work type
On-site
Location
Cupertino, CA
Salary
$262,500–$394,000 / yr
Posted
11 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live today

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $211k
This role $328k
$131k $422k
below market most similar roles pay here above market

This role pays more than 95% of similar roles. Most pay $172,500–$250,000 — the blue band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $328k versus about $211k 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 3497 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $174,149–$277,600 across 2702 roles with salary data.

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At a glance

TL;DR · Senior Staff / Distinguished Engineer

The Sr. Staff / Distinguished Engineer joins the team responsible for the web-scale data acquisition platform. This role owns the technical strategy and execution for systems that crawl, store, and deliver exabytes of web content and images to power Siri, Spotlight, Apple Maps, and foundation models. You will lead the full lifecycle of acquired data, including crawl strategy, prioritization, and the scalable storage and compute architecture required for downstream use. You will apply machine learning to data quality, ranking, and relevance problems to decide what information is worth capturing. Key responsibilities include navigating large-scale technical tradeoffs, partnering with AI research teams to translate model needs into infrastructure requirements, and aligning architecture with broader AI directions for search ranking and training data pipelines.

What does a Engineer earn in California?

Median $199500 from 103 postings across 31 companies.

See salary data

What you'll do

  • Own the technical strategy and execution for Apple’s web-scale data acquisition platform.
  • Design distributed systems to crawl, store, and deliver exabytes of web content and images.
  • Develop ML-driven logic to decide which data to capture and how to score its quality.
  • Architect scalable storage and compute systems to eliminate data gravity bottlenecks for engineering teams.
  • Define how acquired data is consumed for search ranking and AI foundation model training.
  • Translate ML research needs into specific infrastructure and data requirements.
  • Act as a technical voice to senior leadership on platform direction, risk, and resourcing.

What we're looking for

  • 12+ years of experience building and operating distributed systems at petabyte or exabyte scale.
  • Demonstrated experience applying machine learning to data quality, ranking, relevance, or prioritization problems in production.
  • Track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams as a senior lead.
  • Experience partnering with ML/AI research teams to translate model needs into infrastructure and data requirements.
  • B.S. in Computer Science (preferred).
  • M.S. or PhD in Computer Science (preferred).
  • Experience with web crawling, search indexing, or large-scale content pipelines (preferred).
  • Familiarity with how training data pipelines feed large language or foundation models (preferred).

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