Staff / Sr. ML Engineer, Indexing Infrastructure

Apple•Santa Clara, CA

About The Position

The MLPT & Infra teams are building technology for algorithmic search, machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence. Apple’s universal search engine powers search features across Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Messages, and Lookup. As part of this group, the engineer will build the storage and compute foundation for a high-performance computing environment involving trillions of records and petabytes of data, powering search and Apple Intelligence experiences.

Requirements

Strong coding skills and a solid computer science background in algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems.
At least 5 years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems such as databases, storage platforms, or data processing frameworks.
Hands-on experience with petabyte-scale batch data processing using MapReduce, Spark, or similar technologies.
Proficiency in cloud-native architectures and compute orchestration on AWS, including S3, EC2, EKS, and Kubernetes.
Excellent interpersonal skills, with the ability to work independently and drive cross-team efforts.
MS or PhD in Computer Science or a related field.

Nice To Haves

Deep familiarity with columnar and lakehouse formats such as Parquet and Iceberg, and sound judgment in choosing between them at scale.
Experience with storage internals, including compaction, metadata and manifest management, indexing, and query performance tuning.
Experience with workflow orchestration such as Argo and resource scheduling on shared Kubernetes clusters.
Experience with key-value or online serving stores such as Bigtable, HBase, or Cassandra, and multi-cloud data movement.
Experience with search indexing, machine learning, or NLP.