Median Tuning Engineer

Apple•Los Angeles, CA

About The Position

At Apple, extraordinary ideas have a way of quickly becoming extraordinary products, services, and customer experiences. Sound is an essential and compelling facet of the customer experience. Apple has assembled an elite Acoustics team that enables our customers to experience music with delight, communicate with clarity, and enjoy elegant sound throughout our product line. In Apple Acoustics we work with the utmost attention to detail, directly impacting the design of products that millions of people around the world love! Our Audio Technology team is looking for a Media Tuning to shape the subjective and objective audio experience for our next generation of products. This role is responsible for overall audio quality across a diverse range of acoustic designs, ensuring that our products and experiences meet the highest standards of fidelity and intent. You will act as a primary technical and experiential authority for all Apple products including iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch, HomePod, AirPods, Vision Pro with an emphasis on audio playback and recording. DESCRIPTION The successful candidate will be responsible for defining and executing the "Apple Sound" across our entire product ecosystem. This role requires a rare convergence of technical mastery and artistic intuition. Someone who possesses both a golden ear for critical listening and the engineering rigor to translate those perceptions via world-class digital signal processing. You aren’t just adjusting gains and frequencies; you are defining the sonic identity for products like iPhone, Vision Pro, and AirPods, ensuring that every note and voice remains true to the artist's intent while pushing the boundaries of what is possible in small-form-factor acoustics. As a Media Tuning and Applied ML Engineer, you will serve as the final gatekeeper for audio quality. You will navigate the complex intersection of physics and software, utilizing advanced problem-solving to overcome hardware constraints. By curating the datasets that feed our machine learning models and establishing the subjective benchmarks for AI-enhanced audio, you will ensure that our next generation of intelligent features from spatial rendering to real-time speech enhancement feels natural, immersive, and unmistakably Apple. This is a high-impact role that demands a strong aesthetic opinion, the ability to advocate for excellence in a fast-paced cross-functional environment, and a relentless commitment to the user’s sensory experience.

Requirements

5 years professional experience in music/audio production, mastering, or high-fidelity system tuning will also be considered.
Deep technical understanding of equalization, dynamics, time-domain processing, speakers, microphones and audio signal flow.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to translate subjective auditory experiences into actionable engineering requirements.

Nice To Haves

Most of our engineers have advanced degrees in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering or an equivalent field, but if you’ve followed a different path to expertise in Audio engineering, we still want to hear from you.
Experience shipping high-complexity, high-volume consumer electronics (e.g., headphones, smart speakers, or wearable audio).
Familiarity with modern audio ML tasks such as speech synthesis, source separation, and generative soundscapes.
Proficiency in MaxMSP, Python, MatLab or similar environments for data curation and audio analysis as well as standard audio production software.
Professional background in film/video post-production, broadcast, or studio recording.
Proven ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously under tight deadlines in a cross-functional environment.

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