Sr. Machine Learning Engineering Manager – ML & Data Platforms

Apple • Cupertino, CA

75d

About The Position

At Apple, we strive every day to create products that enrich people's lives. Apple Ads group helps users worldwide discover new content seamlessly while supporting publishers and developers in promoting and monetizing their work. Our technology powers advertising in the App Store and Apple News, delivering highly performant, privacy-first services that set new industry standards. The Ads Machine Learning Platform team’s mission is to help Ads teams develop, deploy, and operate innovative AI/ML applications efficiently and at scale. We are looking for a strategic and collaborative technical leader to guide the development of the data foundations that power our AI/ML initiatives. Your team will design and deliver platform capabilities that allow Ads teams to scale features, models, and applications with reliability, speed, and impact.

Requirements

• 6+ years leading engineering teams that build large-scale data infrastructure or ML platforms for enterprise environments.
• Proven experience designing multi-use platform services and influencing cross-team technical roadmaps.
• Strong hands-on expertise with Java, Python, or Scala, and with data architecture, modeling, and SQL.
• Deep technical proficiency in data processing frameworks (Spark, Flink), streaming systems (Kafka), data lakes/warehouses (Iceberg, Delta Lake), databases (Cassandra, Redis), and workflow orchestration tools.
• Experience in both batch and real-time data processing, including CI/CD environments and cloud-native data systems.
• Demonstrated experience contributing to ML platforms supporting data pipelines, model training, serving, and monitoring.
• Strong understanding of AI/ML data management, including handling unstructured data, dataset versioning, and training data quality at scale.
• Hands-on experience building model monitoring and observability systems for drift detection, model degradation, and real-time prediction quality.
• Familiarity with annotation and labeling workflows, as well as generative AI techniques such as transformer architectures, diffusion models, and multimodal learning.
• Proven ability to lead teams delivering mission-critical production services with high reliability and operational excellence.
• Experience working closely with operations teams on deployment, monitoring, and system reliability.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a track record of data-driven architectural decisions.
• BS or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field.

Nice To Haves

• Experience collaborating with ML researchers, data scientists, and product engineers on ML solutions.
• Expertise in data synthesis, fine-tuning, and data management for foundation models and LLMs, including multimodal workflows.
• Knowledge of data privacy and differential privacy in AI/ML systems.
• Practical experience developing or partnering on production ML models.
• Demonstrated ability to influence and foster collaboration across large, cross-functional teams.
• Experience in advertising technology, recommendation systems, or other applied ML domains.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of scalable data foundations that support AI/ML across Apple Ads.
• Build and operate platform services that span the full ML data lifecycle—from ingestion and transformation to training, evaluation, and production monitoring.
• Ensure systems are reliable, privacy-preserving, and built on high-quality data.
• Mentor and grow a team of ML and Data Engineers to deliver core data services, tooling, and frameworks.
• Develop a cohesive strategy for AI/ML infrastructure at enterprise scale.

What This Job Offers

• Education Level: Bachelor's degree
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees