Principal Research Scientist, Siri Innovation Studio
Seattle, WA, USA
USD 244,500-367,400 / year + Equity
Posted on Jun 18, 2026
Join the team redefining what a deeply personal and integrated assistant can be. As part of the Siri organization, you will help shape one of the world's most widely used AI assistants, powered by our next-generation of Apple Intelligence, with capabilities like personal context understanding and on-screen awareness, built with privacy from the ground up. Your work will have direct, meaningful impact for users across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and visionOS. This is a rare opportunity to build at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and human-centered design, shipping technology that is centered around users and their needs. The Siri team is looking for an exceptional Principal Research Scientist with a strong background in ML modeling who is passionate about incubating and deploying innovative technologies and features. The mission of our incubation team is to ideate, prototype, and ship high impact user experiences, partnering with teams across software, hardware, and design to unlock new capabilities for Siri as well as speech-related products such as Dictation. We are an elite team of strongly technical and creative thinkers who pursue both critical missions and strategic explorations collaboratively as a team. This position offers the right person a chance to play an important role in bringing the promise of AI and agentic assistance to millions of Apple users in a safe, reliable, and delightful way. It is a chance to “think different” about AI, the Apple way.
You are a technical leader with a demonstrated track record of identifying the right problems, taking calculated risks, and shipping at scale. In this role, you will lead end-to-end incubations from early ideation to deployment, applying state-of-the-art ML research, algorithmic innovation, and agentic systems to challenges with both immediate and long-term company-wide impact. You bring deep intellectual curiosity, the ability to operate at the frontier of applied research, and the excellent communication skills to align executives and cross-functional partners alike. When your work breaks new ground, you will have the opportunity to publish your findings and engage with the broader academic community all while driving real-world impact at Apple's global scale.
- Lead end-to-end incubations with full technical ownership from ideation and prototyping
- Drive advances in applied ML research and development to address strategic priorities across the company
- Co-invent novel ML modeling approaches and architectures that unlock new product capabilities
- Raise the bar for technical excellence within the team through mentorship, collaboration, and example
- Partner with teams across software, hardware, and design to shape product direction, define technical strategy, and deliver scalable ML technologies that delight users
- MSc or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field; or equivalent track record of incubating and shipping ML features, platforms, and/or products
- 5+ years of experience leading an ML team
- Deep understanding of the ML model lifecycle for large-scale systems
- Demonstrated expertise in ML with a publication record in relevant conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, KDD, ACL, ICASSP, InterSpeech)
- Proficient modeling skills; deep familiarity with toolkits such as JAX, PyTorch, and/or Tensorflow
- Demonstrated ability to influence high-level architecture decisions and advocate for novel research directions with product and executive leadership
- Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, able to translate complex technical work for a broad audience
- Experience working across hardware, software, and design partnerships to bring ML capabilities to production
- Passion for building AI that is both technically rigorous and meaningfully human