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Apple
Seattle, Washington; Sunnyvale, California
Source: Apple careers · View original posting
From Apple's posting. “We” and “our” refer to the employer.
The Multimodal Intelligence Team is building the next generation of foundation models for Apple experiences. We are looking for a research scientist to advance the architectures, pre-training methods, and distillation techniques that make highly capable multimodal models practical across the Apple ecosystem.
Our research spans the full foundation-model lifecycle: model architecture, pre-training objectives, data mixtures, optimization, scaling, distillation, and evaluation. A defining challenge of our work is to develop models that combine broad intelligence with the memory, latency, energy, and privacy requirements of on-device deployment.
You will have the opportunity to shape new research directions, conduct ambitious experiments at scale, and translate successful ideas into foundation-model technologies that can reach Apple products. Where appropriate, this work may also lead to publications and the open sourcing of selected models, research artifacts, evaluations, or tools.
Description
In this role, you will investigate fundamental questions about how multimodal foundation models should be designed, trained, and distilled.
You will develop and evaluate new model architectures, pre-training objectives, data strategies, optimization methods, and teacher–student learning techniques. Your work will explore how capabilities developed in large foundation models can be effectively transferred to smaller, more efficient models without treating distillation as an isolated downstream step.
A major focus of the role will be the co-development of frontier models and efficient models for Apple silicon and on-device intelligence. This includes designing architectures that distill effectively, studying how teacher and student models should be trained together, and developing distillation methods that preserve reasoning, multimodal understanding, instruction following, and other important capabilities under constrained model capacity.
Rather than treating deployment constraints as an afterthought, you will incorporate them into the research process—from early architecture experiments and pre-training through distillation and final model evaluation.
Potential research directions include:
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 $205,400 and $308,500, 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.
LAYIQ is an independent job-discovery service. This listing does not imply a partnership with or endorsement by the employer. Review the original posting for current details and availability.
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