Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Privacy-Preserving Personalization
Apple
Software Engineering, Data Science
Seattle, WA, USA
USD 171,600-302,200 / year + Equity
Posted on Nov 19, 2025
Imagine shaping how millions of people discover content they love on the App Store, Apple Music, and Apple TV+. Our team is responsible for the intelligence that powers these deeply personal experiences. We are at a pivotal moment, defining the next generation of personalization in the era of Generative AI. Our challenge is unique and profound: how do we deliver state-of-the-art, magical user experiences while upholding our unwavering commitment to user privacy?
This is not a standard ML role. We are looking for a pioneering engineer to help us invent the future. You will be a foundational member of the team architecting how we manage and learn from data, setting the standard for privacy and compliance across the globe.
- Architect Petabyte-Scale Systems: Design, build, and optimize robust data processing pipelines that handle petabytes of data efficiently, reliably, and with privacy at their core.
- Pioneer Privacy-Preserving AI: Research, prototype, and deploy innovative solutions for privacy in a Gen-AI world. This includes thinking through everything from on-device intelligence to novel data anonymization and compliance verification techniques.
- Build Intelligent Agents: Design and develop frameworks for agentic AI systems, ensuring they can operate effectively and autonomously within strict privacy and compliance boundaries.
- Define Data Strategy: Go beyond implementation to think strategically about our data ecosystem. You will lead efforts in defining data ontology, ensuring data portability, and embedding world-class data security principles into every system we build.
- Navigate Global Compliance: Collaborate closely with legal, policy, and product teams to translate complex global regulations (like GDPR, CCPA, and others) into concrete engineering solutions, ensuring our systems are compliant by design.
- Innovate and Influence: Act as a thought leader within the organization, driving the technical vision for how we balance personalization and privacy in our most important products.
- BS or MS in Computer Science, Statistics, or a related field, preferably with a focus on machine learning or data privacy.
- Senior-Level Experience: A proven track record of shipping complex, large-scale machine learning systems to production.
- Mastery of Big Data: Expertise in designing and building distributed data processing systems at petabyte scale using technologies like Spark, Flink, Beam, or similar frameworks.
- Strategic Data Mindset: Demonstrated experience thinking critically about data architecture, including data ontology, data security models, and data portability challenges.
- Familiarity with building or integrating agentic systems and Large Language Models (LLMs).
- Privacy & Compliance Expertise: Deep experience and passion for privacy-preserving techniques (e.g., Differential Privacy, Federated Learning, k-Anonymity) and their practical application.
- Experience with MLOps best practices for model deployment, monitoring, and governance in a regulated environment.
- A strong background in software engineering, with proficiency in languages like Python, Scala, or Java.
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.