Principal Applied Researcher

Principal Applied Researcher Apple 3.7 ( ) Cupertino, CA for later Why you should apply for a job to

Apple :

Ranked as one of the 66% say women are treated fairly and equally to men 66% say the CEO supports gender diversity Ratings are based on anonymous reviews by Fairygodboss members. See all reviews Company commitment that women earn the same as men performing similar work includes no salary history disclosure policy. Apple University creates classes, seminars, and tools to help employees understand Apple's culture, organization, and values. Whether you donate time or money, Apple will match charitable contributions up to $10,000 a year. # 200634449-3577_rxr-662 Position summary 't just push the boundaries of what's possible today-you'll define what's next. What Sets This Role Apart This is not a narrow modeling position. You will influence and implement foundational intelligence capabilities across Apple Services-spanning language understanding, behavioral inference, discovery, and growth optimization-while operating with the autonomy and scope expected of senior technical leadership at Apple. ","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.

Preferred Qualifications 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 Proven experience in the architectural design and develop RL or multi-armed bandit experiment platform A record of publications in top-tier ML/AI venues or patent filings demonstrating novel research contributions Minimum Qualifications 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. Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant . Pay & Benefits At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $181,100 and $318,400, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple's discretionary employee stock programs. Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in Apple's Employee Stock Purchase Plan. You'll also receive benefits including: Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses - including tuition. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation. Learn more about Apple Benefits.

Note:

Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program. Why you should apply for a job to

Apple :

Ranked as one of the 66% say women are treated fairly and equally to men 66% say the CEO supports gender diversity Ratings are based on anonymous reviews by Fairygodboss members. See all reviews Company commitment that women earn the same as men performing similar work includes no salary history disclosure policy. Apple University creates classes, seminars, and tools to help employees understand Apple's culture, organization, and values. Whether you donate time or money, Apple will match charitable contributions up to $10,000 a year.