Senior Staff / Distinguished Engineer

Apple Inc

Confirmed live today High trust

Quick summary

Work type: On-site
Location: Santa Clara, CA
Salary: $262,500–$394,000 / yr
Posted: 11 days ago
Freshness: Confirmed live today
Nearby: 99+ roles within 25 mi

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.

Most-posted roles

View all roles at Apple Inc

At a glance

TL;DR · Senior Staff / Distinguished Engineer

Role Posting Log in to save

The Sr. Staff / Distinguished Engineer joins the Machine Learning and AI team to own the technical strategy and execution for a web-scale data acquisition platform. This role involves leading the development of systems that crawl, store, and deliver exabytes of web content and images to power Siri, Spotlight, Apple Maps, and foundation models. You will manage the full lifecycle of acquired data, including crawl strategy, prioritization, and the scalable storage and compute architecture required for downstream use. Key responsibilities include applying machine learning to data quality, ranking, and relevance problems while navigating tradeoffs between distributed systems and ML. You will partner with crawl infrastructure, search indexing, and AI research teams to align architecture with broader AI directions and manage large-scale data pipelines.

What does a Engineer earn in California?

Median $199500 from 103 postings across 31 companies.

See salary data

Skills

Distributed Systems Machine Learning Data Pipelines Web Crawling Search Indexing Foundation Models Data Acquisition Compute Architecture Data Quality Ranking Relevance

What you'll do

Own the technical strategy and execution for Apple’s web-scale data acquisition platform.
Design scalable storage and compute architectures to handle exabytes of web content and images.
Develop ML-driven systems to decide which web data to crawl, score, and prioritize.
Create data pipelines that provide high-quality information for Siri, Spotlight, Apple Maps, and foundation models.
Define how downstream teams consume acquired data for search ranking and AI model training.
Translate AI 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 (M.S./PhD preferred).
Experience with web crawling, search indexing, or large-scale content pipelines specifically (preferred).
Familiarity with how training data pipelines feed large language or foundation models (preferred).
History of mentoring senior engineers and influencing org-level architecture decisions (preferred).

Save