Staff Machine Learning Engineer – Ads Signals Intelligence & Information Retrieval

Apple
Cupertino, United States of America2026-02-23

About the job

Apple’s Ads Signals Intelligence team is seeking a hands-on and experienced Machine Learning Engineer to develop the next generation of ML-driven signal platforms that power retrieval, prediction, and relevance across Apple’s advertising ecosystem—including the App Store and Apple News. This role focuses on building content understanding systems and large-scale infrastructure capable of delivering near real-time signal updates, enabling smarter, privacy-aware decision-making throughout the ad delivery stack.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and scale ML systems that extract high-value semantic signals from structured and unstructured content

Contribute to retrieval and ranking pipelines using techniques in query understanding, semantic embedding, and dense/sparse indexing

Fine-tune and apply Large Language Models (LLMs) for NLP tasks like content labeling, rewriting, and semantic similarity

Construct and utilize knowledge graphs and entity linking systems for enriching creative and query signals

Work with multimodal data (e.g., combining text, image, and metadata signals) to build robust, cross-domain signal representations

Build core components for a content understanding platform, such as entity extraction, topic modeling, creative summarization, and taxonomy generation

Own experimentation, offline evaluation, and online validation of signal pipelines at massive scale

Collaborate across engineering, infra, and product teams to productionize systems while meeting Apple’s high standards for reliability and privacy

Qualifications

Minimum

4+ years of experience in machine learning or applied research, with a focus on retrieval, ranking, NLP, or content understanding

Deep understanding of information retrieval, semantic search, and query-document matching

Strong hands-on experience with LLM fine-tuning, knowledge graph construction, and entity-centric modeling

Experience working with multimodal models, including text, vision, metadata, or audio-based representations

Proficiency in Python, and experience with one or more of ML frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow

Background in statistical modeling, optimization, and ML theory

Exposure to ad tech domains such as auction modeling, targeting, attribution, or creative optimization is a plus

Demonstrated ability to deliver high-impact ML solutions in production environments

Bachelor's in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, NLP, or a related field.

Preferred

7+ years of experience in machine learning or applied research, with a focus on retrieval, ranking, NLP, or content understanding

MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, NLP, or a related field.