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Sr. Staff / Distinguished Engineer

Apple· Machine Learning and AI
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Hybrid (Santa Clara, CA / Cupertino, CA), Hybrid (Remote)full-timePosted 1w ago

About the role

Senior technical leadership role coordinating Apple’s web-scale data acquisition platform. Owns strategy and execution for crawling, storage, and delivery of exabytes of web content to power Siri, Spotlight, Apple Maps, and Apple’s foundation models. Combines distributed systems with ML to decide what data to acquire, how to value it, and how to improve judgment as the web and models evolve.

Responsibilities

  • Own technical strategy and execution for Apple’s web-scale data acquisition platform — systems that crawl, store, and deliver exabytes of web content and images to power Siri, Spotlight, Apple Maps, and Apple’s foundation models.
  • Span the full lifecycle of acquired data: crawl strategy and prioritization, ML-driven decisions about what’s worth capturing and how to value it, and scalable storage/compute architecture to make data usable downstream.
  • Set direction on how Apple acquires data efficiently, broadly, and precisely at scale.
  • Design storage and compute that let engineering teams move fast without bottlenecks caused by data gravity, while applying ML to decide what to crawl, how to score quality and relevance, and how those decisions should evolve.
  • Shape how downstream teams consume acquired data to maximize value for search ranking and AI model training.
  • Collaborate across crawl infrastructure, search indexing, and AI/foundation model teams to align architecture and ML strategy with Apple’s broader AI direction.
  • Navigate ambiguous, large-scale technical tradeoffs independently and act as a trusted technical voice to senior leadership on direction, risk, and resourcing.

Qualifications

  • - 12+ years building and operating distributed systems at large scale (petabyte/exabyte-class storage, compute, or data pipelines)
  • - Demonstrated experience applying machine learning to data quality, ranking, relevance, or prioritization problems in production
  • - Track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams as a senior lead — not just within a single team’s codebase
  • - Experience partnering with ML/AI research teams to translate model needs into infrastructure and data requirements
  • - B.S. in Computer Science, M.S./PhD Preferred
  • - Experience with web crawling, search indexing, or large-scale content pipelines specifically
  • - Familiarity with how training data pipelines feed large language or foundation models
  • - History of mentoring senior engineers and influencing org-level architecture decisions

Skills

Required:Distributed systemsML for data quality / ranking / prioritizationTechnical leadership across multiple teams

Benefits

  • Apple benefits including comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, discounted products and free services, reimbursement for certain educational expenses, discretionary bonuses or commission payments, relocation options
Last updated Oct 16, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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