Job Details

Sr. Machine Learning Engineering Manager – ML Data

Cupertino, California, United States

Software and Services

Summary

Posted: Oct 09, 2025

Role Number: 200622644-0836

At Apple, we strive every day to create products that enrich people's lives. Apple Ads group helps users worldwide discover new content seamlessly while supporting publishers and developers in promoting and monetizing their work. Our technology powers advertising in the App Store and Apple News, delivering highly performant, privacy-first services that set new industry standards.

The Ads Machine Learning Platform team’s mission is to help Ads teams develop, deploy, and operate innovative AI/ML applications efficiently and at scale.

We are looking for a strategic and collaborative technical leader to guide the development of the data foundations that power our AI/ML initiatives. Your team will design and deliver platform capabilities that allow Ads teams to scale features, models, and applications with reliability, speed, and impact.

Description

As an engineering manager, you will lead the design and delivery of scalable data foundations that support AI/ML across Apple Ads. Your team will build and operate platform services that span the full ML data lifecycle—from ingestion and transformation to training, evaluation, and production monitoring—ensuring systems are reliable, privacy-preserving, and built on high-quality data.

This role combines deep technical expertise in large-scale data architecture with the ability to develop a cohesive strategy for AI/ML infrastructure at enterprise scale. You will mentor and grow a team of ML and Data Engineers to deliver core data services, tooling, and frameworks that help Apple Ads teams develop, train, and deploy models effectively.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale data management systems using technologies such as Spark, Iceberg, and Kafka to support AI/ML workloads.

• Develop data quality frameworks for automated validation, drift detection, and anomaly monitoring across training and production.

• Design production model monitoring systems to track data drift, model performance, and prediction quality in real time.

• Build training data services for LLMs, multimodal models, and classical ML use cases.

• Implement feature engineering and data processing tools to ensure consistent training and serving pipelines.

• Build and support A/B testing and experimentation platforms to measure model and feature performance.

• Develop annotation, labeling, and data augmentation pipelines to support model development and fine-tuning.

• Implement privacy-preserving data processing techniques aligned with Apple’s privacy standards.

• Establish best practices for data governance, lineage tracking, and reproducibility across ML workflows.

• Collaborate across teams to define the roadmap for AI/ML data foundations across the Ads ecosystem.

• Lead and mentor a team of ML and Data Engineers, fostering technical growth and collaboration.

• Partner with cross-functional teams to identify shared data services that accelerate model development.

• Encourage innovation in data management and infrastructure design, including handling unstructured and multimodal data at scale.

Minimum Qualifications

• 6+ years leading engineering teams that build large-scale data infrastructure or ML platforms for enterprise environments.

• Proven experience designing multi-use platform services and influencing cross-team technical roadmaps.

• Strong hands-on expertise with Java, Python, or Scala, and with data architecture, modeling, and SQL.

• Deep technical proficiency in data processing frameworks (Spark, Flink), streaming systems (Kafka), data lakes/warehouses (Iceberg, Delta Lake), databases (Cassandra, Redis), and workflow orchestration tools.

• Experience in both batch and real-time data processing, including CI/CD environments and cloud-native data systems.

• Demonstrated experience contributing to ML platforms supporting data pipelines, model training, serving, and monitoring.

• Strong understanding of AI/ML data management, including handling unstructured data, dataset versioning, and training data quality at scale.

• Hands-on experience building model monitoring and observability systems for drift detection, model degradation, and real-time prediction quality.

• Familiarity with annotation and labeling workflows, as well as generative AI techniques such as transformer architectures, diffusion models, and multimodal learning.

• Proven ability to lead teams delivering mission-critical production services with high reliability and operational excellence.

• Experience working closely with operations teams on deployment, monitoring, and system reliability.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a track record of data-driven architectural decisions.

• BS or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience collaborating with ML researchers, data scientists, and product engineers on ML solutions.

• Expertise in data synthesis, fine-tuning, and data management for foundation models and LLMs, including multimodal workflows.

• Knowledge of data privacy and differential privacy in AI/ML systems.

• Practical experience developing or partnering on production ML models.

• Demonstrated ability to influence and foster collaboration across large, cross-functional teams.

• Experience in advertising technology, recommendation systems, or other applied ML domains.

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 $198,300 and $342,800, 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. (https://www.apple.com/careers/us/benefits.html)

Note: Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

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 (https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/2023-06/22-088_EEOC_KnowYourRights6.12ScreenRdr.pdf) .

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 (https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/2023-06/22-088_EEOC_KnowYourRights6.12ScreenRdr.pdf) .

Apple will not discriminate or retaliate against applicants who inquire about, disclose, or discuss their compensation.

Apple participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations as required by law.Learn more about the E-Verify program (https://www.apple.com/jobs/pdf/EverifyPosterEnglish.pdf) .

Apple is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. Reasonable Accommodation and Drug Free Workplace policy Learn more .

Apple is a drug-free workplace. Reasonable Accommodation and Drug Free Workplace policy Learn more .

Apple will consider for employment all qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law. If you’re applying for a position in San Francisco, review the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance guidelines applicable in your area.

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.