Staff/Sr. ML Infrastructure Engineer, Foundation Model Compute Infra
Software Engineering, Other Engineering, Data Science
Cupertino, CA, USA
USD 184,700-324,800 / year + Equity
Posted on Jul 21, 2026
Apple is where individual imaginations gather together, committing to the values that lead to great work. Every new product we build, service we create, or Apple Store experience we deliver is the result of us making each other’s ideas stronger. That happens because every one of us shares a belief that we can make something wonderful and share it with the world, changing lives for the better. It’s the diversity of our people and their thinking that inspires the innovation that runs through everything we do. When we bring everybody in, we can do the best work of our lives. Here, you’ll do more than join something — you’ll add something!
As a Senior/Staff Engineer on the Foundation Model Compute Infrastructure team, you will design and build large-scale infrastructure that powers foundation model training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and inference. You will develop model inference and fine-tuning services, onboard and benchmark new accelerators, and work closely with foundation model researchers and engineers to improve reliability, performance, scalability, and developer productivity across Apple’s AI workloads.
- Design, build, and evolve large-scale model serving and fine-tuning services for foundation model workloads
- Develop reliable infrastructure for model deployment, serving autoscaling, traffic management, job execution, container orchestration, and serving performance analysis
- Improve the performance and usability of model serving and fine-tuning workloads by optimizing latency, throughput, availability, accelerator utilization, checkpoint loading, compilation caching, KV-cache-aware routing, and workflows for launching, monitoring, debugging, evaluating, and deploying models
- Onboard and Benchmark new accelerator technologies into Apple’s compute infrastructure
- Collaborate with the Apple Foundation Model team to integrate technologies such as Pathways, Ray, and Beam, or expose them as reliable and scalable services
- Mentor engineers and partner across teams to influence the technical direction of Apple’s foundation model compute infrastructure
- 5+ years of industry experience building large-scale distributed systems or cloud infrastructure
- Experience with distributed ML training or inference systems
- Strong programming skills in Python, Go, C++, or similar systems languages
- Experience with accelerator infrastructure such as TPU, GPU
- Experience with Kubernetes, container orchestration, or large-scale cluster management systems
- Strong communication and collaboration skills across engineering and research teams
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
- Experience building schedulers, resource managers, or orchestration systems for distributed workloads
- Familiarity with frameworks such as JAX, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Ray, Pathways, or vLLM
- Experience operating large-scale multi-tenant infrastructure in cloud or hybrid environments
- Background in performance optimization, fault tolerance, or resource efficiency for large distributed systems
- Strong expertise in distributed systems, scalability, reliability, and performance engineering
- Experience designing backend services or infrastructure platforms operating at production scale
- MS or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field