Sr. Staff / Distinguished Engineer

Apple • Cupertino, CA

10d

About The Position

Apple is hiring a senior technical leader to own technical strategy and execution for its web-scale data acquisition platform. The platform crawls, stores, and delivers exabytes of web content and images to support Siri, Spotlight, Apple Maps, and Apple’s foundation models. The role spans the lifecycle of acquired data, including crawl strategy and prioritization, machine-learning-driven decisions about what to capture and how to value it, and scalable storage and compute architecture that makes the data usable downstream.

The engineer will shape how Apple acquires data efficiently, broadly, and precisely, and will address challenges at the intersection of distributed systems and machine learning. This includes designing storage and compute systems that let engineering teams work without being bottlenecked by data gravity, applying ML to crawl selection and quality and relevance scoring, and evolving those decisions as the web and Apple’s models change. The role also shapes how downstream teams use acquired data for search ranking and AI model training.

The position partners across crawl infrastructure, search indexing, and AI and foundation-model teams to align architecture and ML strategy with Apple’s broader AI direction. The successful candidate will independently navigate ambiguous, large-scale technical tradeoffs and serve as a trusted technical voice to senior leadership on platform direction, risk, and resourcing.

Requirements

• 12+ years building and operating distributed systems at large scale, including petabyte- or exabyte-class storage, compute, or data pipelines.
• Demonstrated experience applying machine learning to production data quality, ranking, relevance, or prioritization problems.
• Track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams as a senior lead.
• Experience partnering with ML or AI research teams to translate model needs into infrastructure and data requirements.
• B.S. in Computer Science.

Nice To Haves

• M.S. or Ph.D.
• Experience with web crawling, search indexing, or large-scale content pipelines.
• Familiarity with how training-data pipelines feed large language or foundation models.
• History of mentoring senior engineers and influencing organization-level architecture decisions.

Responsibilities

• Own technical strategy and execution for Apple’s web-scale data acquisition platform.
• Shape crawl strategy and prioritization, including machine-learning-driven decisions about what data to acquire and how to value it.
• Guide scalable storage and compute architecture for acquired web content and images.
• Apply ML to decisions about crawl selection, data quality, relevance, and prioritization, and evolve these decisions as the web and Apple’s models change.
• Shape how downstream teams consume acquired data for search ranking and AI model training.
• Partner with crawl infrastructure, search indexing, and AI and foundation-model teams to align architecture and ML strategy with Apple’s broader AI direction.
• Navigate ambiguous technical tradeoffs independently and advise senior leadership on platform direction, risk, and resourcing.
• Set technical direction across multiple teams and influence organization-level architecture.

What This Job Offers

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