Senior Machine Learning Engineer Search Capabilities, Proactive

The Siri team is redefining how hundreds of millions of people access information across Apple devices — with privacy built in from the ground up. As part of the Applied ML team, you will advance Apple Intelligence through agentic search, result ranking, and low-latency production services that power experiences across Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Messages, and more. Our team researches and builds deep search systems for Personal Question Answering — enabling Siri to answer questions about a user's emails, messages, events, files, and more, while keeping personal data private. ## Description You will apply agentic search techniques to enhance user productivity and improve Siri's ability to answer questions about personal content. You will own models responsible for answering user questions using personal documents — with privacy at the forefront — and integrate these with broader Siri capabilities to deliver powerful, intuitive experiences. You will contribute across the full research and development lifecycle, from defining quality metrics and evaluation frameworks to building data pipelines and shaping the long-term technical vision for Personal Question Answering. ## Responsibilities Research, design, implement, and evaluate agentic search systems and underlying models to improve quality, performance, and Personal Question Answering capabilities Extend and improve search technologies through prompt optimization, context management, post-training techniques, and high-quality data pipeline development Define quality metrics and evaluation benchmarks; build evaluation platforms and design experiments to validate hypotheses and support team-wide decisions Collaborate with partner teams to define product requirements, priorities, and opportunities to enhance Personal Question Answering Define the long-term technical vision for Personal Question Answering quality; identify problem areas and integrate solutions into a broader roadmap ## Minimum qualifications 8 or more years of industry experience in machine learning, natural language processing, and applying these techniques at scale Software engineering proficiency in Python, Go, or C/C++ Experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow, or XGBoost Written and verbal communication skills Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent ## Preferred qualifications Knowledge of training, evaluating, and deploying deep learning models and large language models for production systems Experience building production machine learning systems in search, recommendation systems, or information retrieval Ability to prototype solutions and perform analysis to evaluate results Background in search relevance and ranking, question answering, personalization, user behavior modeling, or data-driven decision-making Advanced degree (Master's or Ph.D.) in Computer Science, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience