Senior Applied Researcher

Apple Services Engineering (ASE) builds experiences that touch hundreds of millions of customers every day. From personalized recommendations to proactive intelligence and large-scale commerce systems we are transforming how users discover engage and transact across the Apple ecosystem. The ASE AI/ML organization sits at the nexus of these systemswhere deep applied research advanced machine learning and large language models converge to drive high-impact innovation at unprecedented

We are seeking a Senior Applied Researcher with demonstrated expertise in Generative AI LLM architectures and advanced NLP systems. This role is ideal for a hands-on technical leader who has taken novel ideas from research inception to production deployment and who thrives in environments where ambiguity scale and cutting-edge innovation you wont just push the boundaries of whats possible todayyoull define whats Sets This Role ApartnThis is not a narrow modeling position. You will influence and implement foundational intelligence capabilities across Apple Servicesspanning language understanding behavioral inference discovery and growth optimizationwhile operating with the autonomy and scope expected of senior technical leadership at

Architect design and deploy LLM-powered systems that unlock new capabilities for personalization intelligent automation and customer understanding across Apples services research in areas such as large-scale representation learning semantic modeling topic induction natural language understanding and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).nDevelop and evolve taxonomies embeddings and model architectures capable of disentangling complex user or content behaviors in high-dimensional unstructured LLM fine-tuning evaluation safety alignment and optimization strategies to ensure performant compliant and frictionless user and productize methods such as parameter-efficient adaptation multi-agent orchestration active learning RLHF and novel inference optimization with engineering product and design organizations to translate ambiguous problem spaces into robust ML systems with measurable business and customer prototypes and production-grade solutions that advance Apples ability to reason over text behavioral signals and domain-specific knowledge at to Apples leadership in AI through patent filings publications and internal thought and elevate other researchers fostering excellence in experimentation code quality communication and scientific

Ph.D. in Computer Science Machine Learning NLP Statistics or a related fieldor equivalent industry experience delivering production AI knowledge of deep learning and modern NLP including transformer architectures and foundation model with LLM model development including fine-tuning instruction tuning and prompt engineering for domain-specific in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow with experience deploying models in production understanding of distributed data processing systems (e.g. Spark) and large-scale ability to communicate research outcomes architectural decisions and technical tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Hands-on experience with:nRetrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and vector-based semantic search systemsnRepresentation learning and semantic embeddings for clustering categorization and content understandingnModel evaluation frameworks for language quality relevance hallucination and safetynInference optimization techniques (quantization distillation model compression)nUnderstanding of reinforcement learning policy alignment or RLHF for improving interactive AI systemsnExperience developing personalization ranking or optimization algorithms at scalenProven experience in the architectural design and develop RL or multi-armed bandit experiment platformnA record of publications in top-tier ML/AI venues or patent filings demonstrating novel research contributions