Apple · 10 hours ago
Principal Applied Researcher
San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$181K/yr - $318K/yrApple Services Engineering builds experiences that touch hundreds of millions of customers every day. They are seeking a Senior Applied Researcher with expertise in Generative AI and advanced NLP systems to architect and deploy LLM-powered systems, lead research, and collaborate with various organizations to translate complex problems into effective ML solutions.
AppsArtificial Intelligence (AI)BroadcastingDigital EntertainmentFoundational AIMedia and EntertainmentMobile DevicesOperating SystemsTVWearables
Responsibilities
Architect, design, and deploy LLM-powered systems that unlock new capabilities for personalization, intelligent automation, and customer understanding across Apple’s services ecosystem
Lead research in areas such as large-scale representation learning, semantic modeling, topic induction, natural language understanding, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Develop and evolve taxonomies, embeddings, and model architectures capable of disentangling complex user or content behaviors in high-dimensional, unstructured data
Drive LLM fine-tuning, evaluation, safety alignment, and optimization strategies to ensure performant, compliant, and frictionless user experiences
Explore and productize methods such as parameter-efficient adaptation, multi-agent orchestration, active learning, RLHF, and novel inference optimization techniques
Collaborate with engineering, product, and design organizations to translate ambiguous problem spaces into robust ML systems with measurable business and customer impact
Build prototypes and production-grade solutions that advance Apple’s ability to reason over text, behavioral signals, and domain-specific knowledge at scale
Contribute to Apple’s leadership in AI through patent filings, publications, and internal thought leadership
Mentor and elevate other researchers, fostering excellence in experimentation, code quality, communication, and scientific rigor
Qualification
Required
Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, Statistics, or a related field—or equivalent industry experience delivering production AI systems
Expert knowledge of deep learning and modern NLP, including transformer architectures and foundation model adaptation
Experience with LLM model development, including fine-tuning, instruction tuning, and prompt engineering for domain-specific reasoning
Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow, with experience deploying models in production systems
Strong understanding of distributed data processing systems (e.g., Spark) and large-scale experimentation
Proven ability to communicate research outcomes, architectural decisions, and technical tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders
Preferred
Hands-on experience with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and vector-based semantic search systems
Representation learning and semantic embeddings for clustering, categorization, and content understanding
Model evaluation frameworks for language quality, relevance, hallucination, and safety
Inference optimization techniques (quantization, distillation, model compression)
Understanding of reinforcement learning, policy alignment, or RLHF for improving interactive AI systems
Experience developing personalization, ranking, or optimization algorithms at scale
A record of publications in top-tier ML/AI venues or patent filings demonstrating novel research contributions
Benefits
Comprehensive medical and dental coverage
Retirement benefits
A range of discounted products and free services
Reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition
Discretionary bonuses or commission payments
Relocation
Company
Apple
Apple is a technology company that designs, manufactures, and markets consumer electronics, personal computers, and software.
Founded in 1976
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Apple has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (6998)
2024 (3766)
2023 (3939)
2022 (4822)
2021 (4060)
2020 (3656)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$5.67BKey Investors
Berkshire HathawayMicrosoftSequoia Capital
2025-05-05Post Ipo Debt· $4.5B
2025-01-16Post Ipo Debt· $0.31M
2021-04-30Post Ipo Equity
Leadership Team
Tim Cook
CEO
Craig Federighi
SVP, Software Engineering
Recent News
Venrock
2025-12-01
2025-09-25
Mac Daily News
2025-09-25
Company data provided by crunchbase