Senior AI/ML Engineer - Media Understanding

Summary

Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, new ideas have a way of becoming extraordinary products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. Bring passion and dedication to your job and there's no telling what you can accomplish. Our team builds the systems that help Apple understand media: what a song, episode, show or game is about, how pieces of content relate to each other, and how that understanding can power great experiences across Apple Music, Podcasts, TV and Sports. It's rigorous AI/ML work in a domain that's all about culture, storytelling and taste. Much of the team is based in Barcelona, as part of a wider engineering group headquartered in Cupertino. We're looking for an experienced engineer in Cupertino to be the team's technical presence there: working day to day with partner teams in their timezone, joining the conversations where direction gets set, and bringing what you learn back into the team's work.

Minimum Qualifications

BS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. MS or PhD in Computer Science, ML or a related field preferred. At least 8 years experience building and shipping production ML or large-scale software systems. Experience working across teams and influencing technical decisions beyond your own team. Clear written and confident verbal communication with both engineers and leaders.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with multimodal understanding, generative AI, knowledge graphs or semantic search. Experience with media content or catalogs. Familiarity with Apple Services teams and systems. Experience working with distributed teams across timezones.

Description

You'll work closely with engineering, product and design partners across Apple Services, from early design discussions through to delivery. Some days you'll be deep in a partner team's systems working out how our capabilities fit; other days you'll be helping shape a cross-team plan or representing the team's work to leadership. You'll stay technically close to the team's own systems, because the role works best when you know them well. It suits someone who enjoys connecting teams and shaping direction as much as building, and who likes working across sites and timezones.

Responsibilities

Partner with engineering teams across Apple to understand their needs and design solutions that use the team's media understanding capabilities. Represent the team in Cupertino-based technical and planning discussions, and keep the wider team closely connected to them. Help shape technical direction for media understanding work, aligning closely with the team's leadership in Barcelona and local partner teams. Stay technically close to the team's content understanding systems, contributing to design, technical reviews and hands-on work where it adds most value.