AI Experience Researcher, Product Evaluation, Vision Products Group

We are seeking a highly motivated and analytical AI Experience Researcher to join our team. This role blends cognitive and human sciences data sciences systems design and product evaluation to ensure AI-powered products deliver exceptional and intuitive customer will work alongside a small but impactful team collaborating with ML and data scientists software engineers designers project managers and other cross-functional teams at Apple to define success criteria for AI experiences and create rigorous evaluations that measure these criteria in iterative product development cycles. If youre passionate about applying scientific rigor to real-world problems thrive on innovation and want your work to impact hundreds of millions of users this role offers an exceptional opportunity to make a lasting contribution to products people use every day.

The central challenge of this role is figuring out what good means for an AI experience and then designing rigorous evaluations that measure those qualities reliably and at scale. This requires both deep theoretical grounding in human experience and a solid analytical mindset to operationalize that understanding into scalable evaluation on research in human sciences you will decompose complex AI interactions into their constituent parts reason about how those parts interact and build evaluation frameworks that hold up under the scrutiny of non-deterministic nature of AI experiences and the pressures of iterative product development. You will derive experimental designs create golden data sets write tests and turn them into prompts for LLM judges or instructions for human raters. You will run automated evaluations analyze results and present findings to diverse stakeholders. nnCandidates who bring both quantitative rigor and a qualitative sensibility to recognize patterns in model behaviors and outputs and to develop an interpretive understanding of what the data is and isnt capturing from a human perspective will thrive in this matters most is the ability to hold both orientations at once to think carefully about what makes an experience work and to measure complex human dimensions with precision. We are also looking for someone who is excited to co-create what this discipline looks like going forward bringing intellectual curiosity and a point of view about where human-centered AI evaluation should be headed.

Develop scalable automated evaluation methodologies by operationalizing complex multi-modal multi-turn AI experiences into observable and measurable metrics that work across diverse use cases features or product areanProduce comprehensive evaluation plans detailing evaluation scope validation and data strategy tooling requirements resource allocation and timelinesnDerive experimental designs and write test instructions for LLM judges or for human ratersnDefine requirements for or curate datasets that represent realistic usage; support data generation and annotation workflows to ensure coverage quality and alignment with product goalsnImplement and analyze automated evaluations maintaining rigor around reproducibility identifying key insights and areas for improvement across both qualitative and quantitative patternsnPrepare and present clear concise and impactful evaluation findings to diverse stakeholders translating results into actionable recommendations for model training ranking and product decisionsnPartner with engineers QA data scientists designers and product managers throughout the product development lifecycle to integrate evaluation insights and drive continuous improvementnContribute to evolving human-centered AI evaluation methodologies and help to define best practices for AI experience evaluation as the field matures

Advanced degree in Cognitive Psychology Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) User Experience (UX) Research Learning Sciences Learning Analytics Psychometrics Applied Behavioral Science or a related field with a focus on human cognition behavior and empirical evaluation nA strong data-driven mindset with experience designing and conducting rigorous empirical research or evaluation including experimental design data analysis and interpretation of various qualitative and quantitative data particularly in the context of complex human-system interactions nAbility to reason from theoretical grounding about what makes an experience good in a given context and to translate that reasoning into evaluation frameworks and measurement designs nDemonstrated ability to operationalize research literature qualitative user feedback and quantitative behavioral data into actionable evaluation criteria observable metrics and product insights nProficiency in data analysis and interpretation with a strong understanding of statistical validity in evaluation contexts nExceptional collaboration skills with a track record of working effectively in cross-functional teams that include engineering ML design QA leadership and subject matter experts of diverse domainsnStrong communication skills with the ability to translate complex research findings and evaluation results into clear actionable recommendations for both technical and non-technical audiences

Familiarity with methods for capturing experiential quality beyond task success such as cognitive interviews think-aloud protocols interaction analysis or discourse and conversation analysisnExperience designing and implementing automated evaluation pipelines including writing prompts for LLM judges and constructing human-in-the-loop or multi-turn evaluation setupsnExperience working with multimodal or agentic systems AI/ML models preferably Large Language ModelsnFamiliarity with automated testing frameworks and toolingnExperience with data generation and annotation workflows including curating datasets scenarios and tasks that represent realistic usagenPortfolio demonstrating previous evaluation frameworks research findings or measurable contributions to product improvementnBackground in learning sciences or instructional design with experience reasoning about what makes a complex human experience effective is a plus