Senior Simulation Machine Learning Engineer - Special Projects

Cupertino, California, United States Machine Learning and AI

Play a role in bringing Apple technology to the world. We are looking for a hardworking, dedicated, and results-oriented Animation Engineer. You would join a team building simulation art assets. Apple is where individual imaginations gather together, committing to the values that lead to great work. Every new product we build, service we create, or Apple Store experience we deliver is the result of us making each other’s ideas stronger.

That happens because every one of us shares a belief that we can make something wonderful and share it with the world, changing lives for the better. It’s the diversity of our people and their thinking that inspires the innovation that runs through everything we do. When we bring everybody in, we can do the best work of our lives.

Here, you’ll do more than join something — you’ll add something.

As a Senior Simulation Machine Learning Engineer, you will join an innovation-driven team advancing Apple’s simulation and synthetic data technology to support a wide range of AI/ML initiatives. You will design, prototype, and product ionize systems that generate high-quality 3D scenarios and multi-modal synthetic datasets used throughout Apple’s ML ecosystem.

We’re looking for an engineer with deep experience, strong ML intuition, and the ability to turn ambitions into robust tools. You should be comfortable exploring new ideas, iterating quickly, and driving solutions from prototype to polished implementation. Collaboration is essential — you will partner closely with engineers, animators, technical artists, and ML researchers across the organization. You will play a key role in shaping Apple’s next generation of AI/ML capabilities by defining how simulation data is generated, validated, and delivered at scale.

• Design and implement systems for generating, varying, and validating 3D simulation scenarios, leveraging generative models, procedural techniques, and diverse data sources to create environments, human animation and behavior, rendering and lighting.
• Develop prototypes and production systems that expand our capabilities and scale across teams
• Partner with engineers, ML researchers, and content creators to deliver efficient, reliable pipelines.
• Develop tools and APIs that enable internal users to easily author, manage, and execute simulations.
• Debug and resolve issues across scenario generation, simulation, and data quality.
• Identify architectural improvements and drive long-term strategy for scenario generation and simulation-based data pipelines.
• Stay current with advances in world models, generative video/3D models, neural rendering, procedural content generation, and simulation technologies. Introduce promising methods into production workflows.

• 5+ years of professional experience in ML, simulation, graphics, or related fields.
• Strong proficiency in Python and modern machine learning techniques.
• Working knowledge of C++ and robust software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience with LLMs, VLMs, diffusion models, world models, or similar generative/modeling frameworks.
• Experience with 3D data, scene representations, and rendering fundamentals.
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills are key.

• Familiarity with USD format and tools
• Experience with neural rendering, 3D generative models, learned simulation techniques.
• Experience guiding technical direction, influencing architecture in a software engineering team
• Understanding of real-time and offline rendering pipelines.
• Experience with animation
• Experience with complex industrial or commercial simulation systems or large-scale data generation workflows.

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.

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