Machine Learning Engineer - Visual Agents - Special Projects

Summary

Apple is where individual imaginations gather together, committing to the values that lead to great work. The Special Projects team at Apple is developing novel experiences powered by state-of-the-art agentic vision-language models, and they are seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to help build, fine-tune, and evaluate these systems.

Responsibilities

• Build and evaluate vision-language agents that perceive real-world scenes and incorporate that context into conversational models
• Curate, annotate, and build multimodal datasets to support model training and evaluation
• Develop automated evaluation pipelines including LLM-as-judge frameworks, human evaluation protocols, and domain-specific benchmarks
• Fine-tune Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual-Language Models (VLMs) to improve performance for specific use cases
• Work closely with other ML Researchers to define evaluation criteria and methodology to systematically evaluate foundation models
• Design controlled experiments to measure model capabilities, identify failure modes, and drive iterative model improvements
• Conduct robust statistical analysis to identify model deficiencies and failure modes and performance gaps

Skills

• BA or Master's degree in Computer Science or Machine Learning
• 2+ years of hands-on experience building and evaluating generative AI or multimodal models
• Experience working with vision-language models or multimodal systems
• Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks (Pytorch or Tensorflow)
• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or other STEM field
• Prior industry internship or research experience applying ML to product use cases
• Experience with video understanding, temporal reasoning, or activity recognition
• Familiarity with agentic system design including tool use, grounding, or perceive-act loops
• Experience building or working with large-scale multimodal data and annotation pipelines
• Proficiency in training, fine-tuning, and evaluation of foundation models and frameworks
• Publications or technical presentations in Machine Learning journals or conferences
• Excellent communication skills and cross functional collaboration

Qualifications

Must Haves

• BA or Master's degree in Computer Science or Machine Learning
• 2+ years of hands-on experience building and evaluating generative AI or multimodal models
• Experience working with vision-language models or multimodal systems
• Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks (Pytorch or Tensorflow)

Nice to Haves

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or other STEM field
• Prior industry internship or research experience applying ML to product use cases
• Experience with video understanding, temporal reasoning, or activity recognition
• Familiarity with agentic system design including tool use, grounding, or perceive-act loops
• Experience building or working with large-scale multimodal data and annotation pipelines
• Proficiency in training, fine-tuning, and evaluation of foundation models and frameworks
• Publications or technical presentations in Machine Learning journals or conferences
• Excellent communication skills and cross functional collaboration

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical and dental coverage
• Retirement benefits
• A range of discounted products and free services
• Reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition
• Discretionary bonuses or commission payments
• Relocation