Staff/Sr. ML Infrastructure Engineer, Foundation Model Compute Infra

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.

Responsibilities:

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

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

Minimum Qualifications

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

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 $184,700 and $324,800, 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

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!