Applied Research Software Engineer

Apple • San Jose, CA

1d

About The Position

The Applied Research Software Engineer will be a core contributor on an interdisciplinary team of specialized researchers and engineers focused on emerging technologies. The role leads end-to-end incubations, from early ideation through deployment, applying state-of-the-art machine learning research, algorithmic innovation, and agentic systems to problems with immediate and long-term impact. This hands-on, cross-disciplinary position works at the research-to-product boundary, helping shape Apple’s intelligent systems and create new user experiences. It involves supporting technology investigations and moving across the productization process, from prototypes to shipped features. Unlike a typical ML engineering role focused on maintaining an existing system within a large team, this position combines interdisciplinary pathfinding with realizing projects as features in future Apple products.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science or an adjacent technical field.
• At least 6 years of engineering experience building and maintaining data-intensive systems, including feature pipelines, training infrastructure, or evaluation frameworks.
• Strong proficiency in Python and C++, with experience in complex, multi-language systems.
• Expertise in deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Familiarity with state-of-the-art machine learning approaches, including VLMs, diffusion models, and reinforcement learning.
• Experience in a specialty discipline such as robotics and machine perception, computer vision, graphics, or simulation.
• Experience with real-time or near-real-time systems and deeply integrated architectures spanning local SoCs through cloud compute.

Nice To Haves

• Strong interest in emerging models and state-of-the-art research.
• Interest in contextual, personalized computing and supporting principles from cognitive science and psychology.
• A strong point of view on the future of human-AI interaction and motivation to help create ethical, privacy-centric products.
• Familiarity with hardware bring-up, data communication protocols, or sensor integration.

Responsibilities

• Invent and integrate ideas into compelling research experiments and demos, then support productization through on-device implementation, performance optimization and analysis, API specification, and model architecture and training at scale.
• Work cross-functionally to connect new systems and APIs and resolve complex bugs.
• Prioritize systems that support deterministic, reproducible, and analyzable execution.
• Participate in and lead architecture and design reviews, promoting clarity, reliability, and maintainability.
• Serve as a responsible and experienced pilot for AI coding agents.
• Design and support data collection systems for user studies, annotation and labeling pipelines, and research workflows.
• Lead end-to-end technology incubations from ideation through deployment.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior