Staff Machine Learning Engineer – Ads Signals Intelligence & Information Retrieval

Apple • Cupertino, CA

5d

About The Position

Apple Ads brings a customer-centric approach to advertising, helping people find what they need and advertisers grow their businesses. This role is within the Ads Signals Intelligence team, focusing on developing the next generation of ML-driven signal platforms for retrieval, prediction, and relevance across Apple's advertising ecosystem (App Store, Apple News, MLS Season Pass). The position involves building content understanding systems and large-scale infrastructure for near real-time signal updates, enabling privacy-aware decision-making in the ad delivery stack. Key responsibilities include developing rich semantic signals from various sources (queries, creatives, metadata, user interactions) to support scalable ad retrieval, creative ranking, and marketplace optimization. The role will involve working with LLM fine-tuning, knowledge graph construction, semantic search, and multimodal representation learning. While ad tech knowledge is a plus, the core focus is on building privacy-centric signals for advanced ML systems. This position will shape the foundation of Apple's ad ranking and relevance systems, contributing to high-performing, privacy-first advertising experiences at scale.

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience in machine learning or applied research, with a focus on retrieval, ranking, NLP, or content understanding.
• Deep understanding of information retrieval, semantic search, and query-document matching.
• Strong hands-on experience with LLM fine-tuning, knowledge graph construction, and entity-centric modeling.
• Experience working with multimodal models, including text, vision, metadata, or audio-based representations.
• Proficiency in Python.
• Experience with one or more ML frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Background in statistical modeling, optimization, and ML theory.
• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, NLP, or a related field.

Nice To Haves

• Exposure to ad tech domains such as auction modeling, targeting, attribution, or creative optimization is a plus.
• 7+ years of experience in machine learning or applied research, with a focus on retrieval, ranking, NLP, or content understanding.
• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, NLP, or a related field.

Responsibilities

• Develop the next generation of ML-driven signal platforms for retrieval, prediction, and relevance across Apple's advertising ecosystem.
• Build content understanding systems and large-scale infrastructure for near real-time signal updates.
• Develop rich semantic signals from queries, creatives, metadata, and user interactions.
• Support scalable ad retrieval, creative ranking, and marketplace optimization.
• Work with LLM fine-tuning, knowledge graph construction, semantic search, and multimodal representation learning.
• Build high-quality, privacy-centric signals that fuel advanced machine learning systems.
• Shape the foundation of Apple's ad ranking and relevance systems through world-class signal understanding.
• Contribute to high-performing, privacy-first advertising experiences at scale.

What This Job Offers

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