AIML - Applied Research Engineer, Machine Translation

Requirements

• Strong programming and software engineering skills (Python, C++, or equivalent), with hands-on experience training and fine-tuning large-scale models
• Experience building and optimizing machine translation, natural language processing, or related sequence-to-sequence systems using modern LLM architectures
• Practical knowledge of LLM post-training techniques, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), and Group Preference Optimization (GRPO) or similar reward-based optimization methods
• Experience with large-scale data processing frameworks (Spark, Dask, or equivalent) and synthetic data generation pipelines
• Strong production mindset: ability to take models from research to reliable, customer-facing deployment
• Ability to manage complex processes across multiple stakeholders in a fast-paced environment
• Excellent communication skills and a proactive, collaborative approach to teamwork
• Deep motivation to ship the best, most impactful products for Apple's customers

Nice to Haves

• Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, or related field
• Experience in applied machine learning or software engineering, with demonstrable impact on shipped products or systems
• Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch or equivalent) and large-scale model training
• Familiarity with reward modeling, preference data collection, or RL-based fine-tuning for language models is a strong plus
• Distributed and cloud computing experience (GCP, AWS, or equivalent) is a plus
• Experience with speech translation or multimodal models is a plus

What You'll Be Doing

• Apply and advance modern training paradigms, including SFT, RL-based fine-tuning, and preference optimization
• Push translation quality to new heights across text and speech modalities
• Own and improve end-to-end model development pipelines
• Take models from research to customer-facing deployment
• Manage complex processes in a fast-paced environment

Perks and Benefits

• Be part of a motivated and dynamic team
• Ship models that reach hundreds of millions of users
• Relentless focus on quality, efficiency, and continuous improvement