{"id":4205315,"url":"https://alion.io/job/apple-staff-sr-ml-engineer-web-indexing","title":"Staff / Sr. ML Engineer, Web Indexing","company":{"id":12,"name":"Apple","domain":"apple.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/apple","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Apple Jobs","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":94,"open_postings":1125,"ghost_share":0.001,"stale_share":0.036,"repost_share":0.02,"time_to_fill_p50_days":148,"computed_at":"2026-11-12T10:38:37Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Santa Clara, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":true},{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":true},{"name":"Flink","optional":true},{"name":"Google Bigtable","optional":true},{"name":"HBase","optional":true},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-12T18:58:07Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-12","last_verified_at":"2026-11-12T23:26:24Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"We’re looking for an ML Engineer to help build and scale the indexing infrastructure powering web and image search. The team runs both petabyte-scale offline batch pipelines and near-real-time indexing systems that turn web documents, images, and metadata into production-ready indexes.\nWe work across distributed computing, data processing, and storage, while partnering with crawling, ranking, ML, retrieval, and infrastructure teams to shape the long-term indexing strategy. This is a cross-functional role requiring strong technical depth, organizational influence, and the ability to drive complex, multi-team initiatives.\nDescription\nYou’ll own both technical direction and execution for two core systems: large-scale offline indexing (distributed pipelines processing petabytes of content into production indexes) and fresh/near-real-time indexing (low-latency propagation of new or updated content). Responsibilities span architecture, scalability, reliability, and efficiency across billions of documents and images.\nSuccess requires close collaboration across teams to resolve dependencies, make architecture tradeoffs, and drive large programs to completion, while acting as a key liaison to senior leadership on strategy, risks, and resourcing.\nMinimum Qualifications\nSignificant experience building large-scale distributed systems or data infrastructure\nEngineering management experience leading software teams\nStrong grasp of distributed systems, large-scale data processing, and storage\nExperience with distributed batch processing (e.g., MapReduce-style models)\nTrack record leading multi-team technical initiatives and influencing without direct authority\nStrong communication skills for technical topics with senior leadership\nBS in CS or related field, or equivalent experience\nPreferred Qualifications\nExperience with batch/streaming frameworks (Spark, Beam, Flink, Kafka, 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