Machine Learning Compute Efficiency Lead, Infrastructure & Planning

Apple's Platform Acceleration & Compute Efficiency (PACE) is a high-leverage team operating at the critical intersection of our ML organizations, underlying compute infrastructure, and core platform tooling. Our mission is to empower Apple's software engineering teams with efficient, scalable compute. By driving out operational friction and optimizing the broader machine learning ecosystem, we directly accelerate the pace of development across the company.

As foundation models become increasingly central to Apple's user experiences, maximizing the efficiency of our ML compute is paramount. In this role, you will focus relentlessly on compute efficiency, ensuring that Apple's models run as fast, reliably, and cost-effectively as possible. You will tackle massive optimization challenges, from maximizing hardware utilization across GPUs, TPUs, and custom Apple Silicon, to shaping workload scheduling and capacity allocation for large model serving.

We are seeking a Senior Architect with deep expertise in ML infrastructure to act as a linchpin for Apple's foundational inference strategy. You will be instrumental in defining, establishing, and monitoring compute efficiency metrics across the software engineering organization. By partnering closely with model developers and infrastructure providers, your work will directly reduce serving costs, shape core engineering decisions, and enable the highly efficient, scalable inference required to power Apple Intelligence for hundreds of millions of users.

Description

- Own and support ML compute management for Apple's inference workloads (GPU, TPU, and custom silicon) to enable large-scale model serving.

- Collaborate closely with Apple Intelligence and ML engineering teams to understand roadmaps and resource pain points to develop and implement resource strategies.

- Optimize Apple's ML workloads by driving performance improvements, maximizing resource utilization, and reducing service costs through deep root cause analysis that shapes both engineering decisions and the end customer experience.

- Architect solutions for large-scale optimization problems, including capacity allocation, workload scheduling, and cost reduction, enabling Apple's AI-driven experiences.

- Advocate on behalf of Apple's ML engineers to bring a consolidated view of ML platform and model inference requirements to Apple's internal infrastructure platform providers and 3rd party public cloud providers.

Preferred Qualifications

MS or PhD in a relevant field

Direct experience with foundation model serving, inference, and training at scale

Familiarity with PyTorch, JAX, cluster management (Slurm, Kubernetes), or GPU/TPU hardware

Prior experience in efficiency, FinOps, or capacity planning

Experience negotiating technical roadmaps with platform or infrastructure teams

Background in technical and financial decision-making (TCO modeling, cost optimization)

Minimum Qualifications

BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience

7+ years in ML infrastructure, systems architecture, or efficiency/optimization roles at scale

Strong conceptual understanding of foundation model inference/serving at scale and distributed training (data/tensor/pipeline parallelism), GPU/TPU utilization, memory hierarchies, and cluster scheduling

AI-fluent and capable of quickly adapting to AI workflows and empowerment

Proven track record of driving complex cross-org technical initiatives through influence, not authority

Strong analytical skills with experience designing or interpreting utilization analyses, capacity models, or efficiency metrics

Clear written and verbal communication, comfortable presenting to VPs and white-boarding with senior ML engineers

Pay & Benefits

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 $181,100 and $318,400, 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

Note: Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.