Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Ads Relevance & Quality

Apple • Cupertino, CA

2d

About The Position

Apple Ads is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to join its Ads Relevance and Quality team. The team builds systems that evaluate ad relevance, identify low-quality or offensive content, and optimize user satisfaction. The role focuses on applied machine learning, natural language processing, and content quality, with the goal of supporting useful, relevant, and trustworthy advertising across Apple Services, including the App Store, Apple News, and MLS Season Pass.

The engineer will design models and systems for query and ad understanding, inappropriate-content detection, relevance scoring, and keyword-to-ad matching. They will work with privacy-preserving datasets, translate content-integrity standards into measurable ML objectives, and evaluate results through experiments. The role involves close collaboration with engineering, research, product, policy, infrastructure, and moderation teams to deploy models at production scale.

Requirements

• At least 4 years of experience applying machine learning at scale in areas such as ad tech, content moderation, search ranking, or recommendation systems.
• Strong expertise in natural language processing, including offensive-content detection and semantic matching.
• Experience with Transformer-based architectures such as BERT or DistilBERT and training pipelines in TensorFlow or PyTorch.
• Familiarity with fine-tuning large language models for downstream tasks such as classification, content moderation, or semantic relevance.
• Familiarity with quality and fairness evaluation frameworks, including precision, recall, coverage, and policy alignment.
• Hands-on experience with A/B testing, experimentation frameworks, and performance debugging in production.
• Proficiency in Python and SQL.
• Strong problem-solving and communication skills, including translating abstract trust and safety goals into deployable solutions.
• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, or a related technical field.

Nice To Haves

• At least 7 years of experience applying machine learning at scale in areas such as ad tech, content moderation, search ranking, or recommendation systems.
• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, or a related technical field.
• Additional experience in Scala or Java.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement machine learning models to evaluate and improve ad relevance, trust, and quality for user queries.
• Build NLP and multimodal models to detect offensive, unsafe, or policy-violating content at scale.
• Develop methods for semantic query understanding, ad understanding, relevance scoring, and keyword-to-ad matching.
• Collaborate with product and policy teams to translate content-integrity standards into measurable machine-learning objectives.
• Use large-scale, privacy-preserving datasets to discover and operationalize new quality signals.
• Conduct offline and online experiments to measure impact on user trust and satisfaction across Ads.
• Work cross-functionally with infrastructure, product, and moderation teams to deploy models at production scale.

What This Job Offers

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