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Senior Search Engineer - Services Special Projects

Apple· Software and Services
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Cupertino, California$184.7k - $324.8kFull-timePosted 3w ago

About the role

Senior technical role focused on designing, building, and optimizing large-scale, low-latency search systems at Apple scale, integrating Generative AI with Information Retrieval, and collaborating with AI/ML scientists and cross-functional teams to deliver personalized search experiences.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and maintain large-scale, low-latency, high-performance search systems that can scale.
  • Develop and optimize ranking, relevance, and retrieval through ML/AI models and merging traditional keyword search with vector-based semantic search using embedding models and vector databases.
  • Develop sophisticated NLP pipelines for intent classification, entity extraction, semantic parsing, and query expansion.
  • Merge traditional keyword search (BM25) with vector-based semantic search using embedding models and vector databases.
  • Design and Implement machine learning models (e.g. Learning to Rank, Cross Encoder based models) and multi-stage reranking algorithms to optimize search precision and recall.
  • Build offline and online evaluation metrics, A/B testing frameworks, and continuous improvement strategies for search quality.
  • Partner with Research Scientists, Product, Data Engineering, MLOps, Search Infrastructure teams, and UX to align search features with business and user goals.
  • Stay current with the latest research and innovations in search and information retrieval technologies, translating them into scalable production systems.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a related field
  • 10+ years of experience in Machine Learning, Data Science, or Software Engineering roles with a significant focus on search infrastructure and information retrieval.
  • Hands on experience building and deploying large-scale search systems in production.
  • Deep understanding of information retrieval, query understanding, query augmentation and multi-stage ranking algorithms
  • Strong foundation in deep learning architectures for search and retrieval (e.g. transformers, cross encoder models, graph neural networks, learned sparse representations).
  • Experience with to multi-objective optimization in search systems (e.g., relevance, diversity, freshness, fairness).
  • Experience with real-time systems, user feedback loops, and model retraining pipelines.
  • Strong proficiency in Go, Java, C++ and Python
  • Proven experience with ML frameworks including PyTorch, XGBoost.
  • Familiarity with cloud environments (including AWS) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Extensive experience working with data processing pipelines including Spark, Flink
  • Hands-on experience with vector search including FAISS
  • Familiarity with streaming platforms including Apache Kafka
  • Experience with search infrastructure including OpenSearch, and/or Elasticsearch
  • Hands-on experience deploying, serving, and optimizing LLMs, Embeddings and ML models directly in the production query/request path
  • Past successful deployments with tuning of models (including quantization) for performance and quality optimization
  • Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset

Skills

Required:Search system design and optimization
Nice to have:vector searchstreamingsearch infrastructure

Benefits

  • Base pay range between $184,700 and $324,800 (base pay determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location)
  • Discretionary employee stock programs including RSUs and Employee Stock Purchase Plan
  • Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, product discounts and free services, educational expense reimbursement
  • Possibility of discretionary bonuses or commission payments and relocation
Last updated Oct 2, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Apple

Discover the innovative world of Apple and shop everything iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV, plus explore accessories, entertainment, and expert device support.

Discover the innovative world of Apple and shop everything iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV, plus explore accessories, entertainment, and expert device support.

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