Senior Engineering Manager, Conversational AI & Knowledge Intelligence

Santa Clara Seattle Until 9/21/2026 8+ years exp First posted July 23, 2026 Last posted July 23, 2026
Job description

Apple is where individual imaginations gather together, contributing to the values that lead to great work. Every new idea has the potential to become an extraordinary product, service, or customer experience. The AI, Search & Knowledge Platforms team builds the foundational intelligence powering Apple's most iconic experiences, including Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Apple Intelligence, and many other applications across the Apple ecosystem.

Description

We are seeking an exceptional Senior Engineering Manager to lead the engineering organization responsible for Conversational AI, World Knowledge Question Answering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and Knowledge Intelligence. This team develops the next generation of AI-powered experiences that enable billions of users worldwide to ask questions naturally and receive accurate, grounded, personalized, and delightful answers. You will lead a world-class team of machine learning engineers, software engineers, data engineers, and applied scientists building scalable knowledge systems, LLM-powered reasoning capabilities, retrieval infrastructure, and knowledge generation platforms that continuously improve the quality, freshness, and intelligence of Apple's conversational experiences.

Minimum Qualifications

MS or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, or a related technical field.
8+ years of experience leading large-scale engineering and machine learning organizations delivering AI-powered products in production.
Deep experience building conversational AI, search, question answering, knowledge systems, recommendation systems, or large-scale information retrieval platforms.
Strong technical expertise in large language models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), NLP, and distributed systems.
Demonstrated ability to define long-term technical strategy while successfully executing complex cross-functional programs involving multiple engineering organizations.

Preferred Qualifications

Deep expertise in modern LLM architectures, agentic AI, retrieval systems, semantic search, vector databases, embedding models, knowledge graphs, and multi-stage retrieval and ranking systems.
Strong engineering and R&D experience in LLM post-training, reinforcement learning for language models (RLHF, RLAIF), reward modeling, policy optimization, model alignment, grounding, hallucination reduction, factuality improvement, and production deployment of large-scale AI systems.
Experience building large-scale knowledge generation, knowledge distillation, content understanding, and knowledge enrichment pipelines that continuously improve AI quality and freshness.
Strong product vision with the ability to translate emerging AI technologies into impactful customer experiences across consumer products.
Outstanding leadership, organizational, and communication skills with demonstrated success influencing senior executives and driving alignment across multiple organizations.
Passion for building inclusive, high-performing engineering teams and fostering a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and continuous learning.

About this role

Summary

Lead engineering teams developing AI-powered conversational systems and knowledge platforms.

Job title

Senior Engineering Manager, Conversational AI & Knowledge Intelligence

Experience level

8+ years

Minimum experience

8+ years exp

Industry

technology

Location requirements

Remote work allowed in Santa Clara and Seattle.

Salary

Not specified

Management role

Yes

Skills & keywords

Required skills

large language modelsNLPdistributed systemsinformation retrieval

Preferred skills

agentic AIsemantic searchknowledge graphsreinforcement learningmodel deployment

Specializations

conversational AIlarge language modelsNLPretrieval systemsknowledge systems
Locations

Structured locations inferred from the posting.

Santa Clara, CA, USA

Remote City

Seattle, WA, USA

Remote City