About the Role

Siri helps hundreds of millions of people find the information they are looking for. A critical part of that mission is helping them quickly find and discover local businesses, places of interest, and addresses. Users rely on us for relevant and easy access to local information like finding a favorite or romantic restaurant, business hours, nearby coffee shop addresses, and directions to prominent locations.

The Geo domain team is redefining how hundreds of millions of people use their devices to navigate and explore the physical world around them. We are part of a wider effort to power search across a variety of Apple products - including Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Messages, and more. As part of our team, you will be using innovative machine learning techniques and LLMs in order to understand queries, rank documents, and find useful answers to users' questions.

We are looking for an experienced ML engineer with hands-on experience in search and recommendation and deploying powerful machine learning models at scale. You will join a team that combines strong technical skills, product vision, and a love of all things local to bring together the pieces needed to deliver an extraordinary Maps experience in Siri and Spotlight.

As a member of our fast-paced group, you'll have the unique and rewarding opportunity to shape upcoming products from Apple. Our team includes a diversity of backgrounds from applied scientists with a focus in NLP to experienced distributed systems. We are looking for candidates with both applied machine learning experience and strong engineering skills.

Responsibilities

• Own the entire ML development cycle from opportunity analysis, exploration, and prototyping to data collection, feature engineering, training, evaluation, and deployment in production.
• Lead the development of machine learning models to improve search quality across retrieval, ranking, reranking, and query understanding.
• Improve search quality and experience by leveraging techniques such as learning-to-rank, embedding models, contrastive learning, multi-task learning, and reinforcement learning where appropriate.
• Mentor junior engineers and provide technical leadership in architecting ML systems and designing ML models.
• Understand product requirements, then translate them into modeling tasks and engineering tasks.

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, or deep learning.
• A deep understanding of machine learning theory, including supervised learning, ranking models, embeddings, representation learning, and evaluation metrics.
• Proven ability to apply advanced ML techniques to improve search relevance and retrieval quality at scale.
• Comfortable leading experimentation, offline evaluation, and online A/B testing for iterative improvements in search quality.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, the ability to work independently as well as as part of a team.
• A Master's Degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience in machine learning or a related field.

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced diploma in AI, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or Mathematics

Equal Opportunity

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant.