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About This Role
The Production Engineering team within the AI and Data Platform (AiDP) organization manages a wide array of real\-time, near real\-time, and batch analytical solutions. These platforms are integral to core business functions across Apple. These include sales, operations, finance, AppleCare, marketing, and services, and are instrumental in driving critical, data\-driven decisions. To build these solutions, we leverage a combination of proprietary and leading open\-source technologies such as Kafka, Spark, Iceberg, and Airflow. A key part of our mission is to enable AI\-centric automations that enhance the overall efficiency and intelligence of the platform. We are looking for passionate engineers who thrive on solving complex infrastructure challenges at scale, both on\-premises and in the cloud. If you are dedicated to optimizing scalable, maintainable, and user\-friendly systems, you will find compelling opportunities to make a significant impact at AiDP.
Description
The Service Reliability Engineer (SRE) role within AiDP Production Engineering is a dynamic position that blends strategic architectural design with hands\-on technical execution. As an SRE, you will be responsible for configuring, tuning, and ensuring the resilience of complex, multi\-tiered systems to achieve optimal application performance, stability, and availability. Our team manages critical data pipelines and applications across both bare\-metal and cloud computing platforms, delivering essential data processing for all of Apple’s key business functions. We operate at an immense scale, handling exabytes of data, petabytes of memory, and tens of thousands of jobs to enable predictable and performance data analytics that power features and inform decisions across the company. If you are passionate about designing, building, and running data infrastructure that has a direct and significant impact on Apple’s global business operations, this is the ideal opportunity for you.","responsibilities":"Ability to understand the application requirements (Performance, Security, Scalability etc.) and assess the right services/topology on AWS, Baremetal \& Kubernetes.
Build automation to enable self\-healing systems.
Build tools to monitor high performance \& alert the low latency applications.
Ability to troubleshoot application specific, core network, system \& performance issues.
Involvement in challenging and fast paced projects supporting Apple’s business by delivering innovative solutions.
Partner with engineering teams to prioritize and fix production defects.
Take knowledge transition from engineering teams for changes being rolled out in production.
Triage incidents based on the impact, devise and implement mitigation steps to unblock the business.
Conduct RCA, log defects and partner with engineering team for prioritization.
Support java based applications \& Spark/Flink jobs on Baremetal, AWS \& Kubernetes.
Share on\-call rotation with other team members to support apps and services in scope.
Preferred Qualifications
Solid understanding of system design, data structures, and incident management best practices.
Should be able to understand complex architectures and be comfortable working with multiple teams.
Observability tools (e.g: Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch).
Ability to conduct performance analysis and troubleshoot large scale distributed systems.
Should be highly proactive with a keen focus on improving uptime/availability of our mission critical services.
Strong expertise in troubleshooting complex production issues.
Excellent problem solving, critical thinking, and communication skills.
Proven ability to resolve incidents, perform root cause analysis, and drive system reliability improvements.
Experience using GenAI or automation tools for issue detection, alerting, or remediation.
Experience in data visualization tools such as Tableau, Business Objects, ThoughtSpot.
Minimum Qualifications
4\+ years experience in cloud\-native services, including ETL frameworks like Apache Spark, and Flink.
4\+ years experience in messaging systems (Kafka) and cloud infrastructure \& services, AWS, GCP, Kubernetes.
4\+ years of experience in modern \& distributed databases such as Snowflake, Cassandra, SingleStore, and SAP HANA.
4\+ years of programming experience in Python or Java.
BS/MS in computer science or equivalent experience.
Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant .
Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 26,159 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 91% of the market. At Apple, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $166,983 based on 13,781 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $131,300.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $184,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $309,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Architect ($292,900). By seniority level: Entry: $76,880; Mid: $131,300; Senior: $227,400; Director: $244,288; VP: $234,620.
Apple AI Hiring
Apple has 160 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across Research Engineer, MLOps Engineer, AI/ML Engineer, AI Software Engineer. Positions span Cupertino, CA, US, Austin, TX, US, Santa Clara, CA, US. Compensation range: $153K - $487K.
Location Context
AI roles in Austin pay a median of $212,800 across 317 tracked positions. That's 16% above the national median.
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 26,159 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 2,416 entry-level, 16,247 mid-level, 5,153 senior, and 2,343 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 7% of the market (1,863 positions). The remaining 24,200 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $184,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $309,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 28 roles); AI Architect ($292,900 median, 108 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 19 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 26,159 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (23,752), AI Software Engineer (598), AI Product Manager (594). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (2,416) are outnumbered by mid-level (16,247) and senior (5,153) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 2,343 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 7% of all AI roles (1,863 positions), with 24,200 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $184,000. Top-quartile roles start at $244,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $309,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $122,200. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Rag (16,749 postings), Aws (8,932 postings), Rust (7,660 postings), Python (3,815 postings), Azure (2,678 postings), Gcp (2,247 postings), Prompt Engineering (1,469 postings), Openai (1,269 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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