Sr Staff Machine Learning Engineer Jobs in Santa Clara, CA
Sr Staff Machine Learning Engineer jobs in Santa Clara are in strong demand, concentrated in the Central Expressway corridor, the Lawrence Expressway tech cluster, and the Greater Mission College district, across semiconductor AI, enterprise cloud platforms, and consumer hardware. Employers hiring right now include ServiceNow, Apple, and Qualcomm. See the openings below and apply to the ones that match your experience.
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Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, great ideas have a way of becoming great products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. Bring passion and dedication to your job and there's no telling what you could accomplish.
Do you want to make Siri and Apple products smarter for our users? The MLPT & Infra teams are building groundbreaking technology for algorithmic search, machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence. Our universal search engine powers search features across a variety of Apple products, including Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Messages and Lookup.
Description
As part of this group, you will build the storage and compute foundation behind one of the most exciting high-performance computing environments: trillions of records, petabytes of data, and the systems that turn them into search and Apple Intelligence experiences that delight our customers every day.","responsibilities":"Design and build our web signal store, a petabyte-scale Parquet/Iceberg lakehouse holding trillions of web documents and signals.
Design and build our in-house MapReduce-style processing framework, which runs thousands of workers on Kubernetes.
Improve performance, reliability, and cost at trillion-row scale, from read/write throughput and compaction to fault-tolerant batch jobs on shared clusters.
Own production health, including monitoring, on-call, and root-cause fixes, and raise the engineering bar through design and code reviews.
Preferred Qualifications
Deep familiarity with columnar and lakehouse formats (Parquet, Iceberg), and the judgment to choose between them at scale
Experience with storage internals: compaction, metadata and manifest management, indexing, and query performance tuning
Experience with workflow orchestration (e.g., Argo) and resource scheduling on shared Kubernetes clusters
Experience with key-value or online serving stores (e.g., Bigtable, HBase, Cassandra) and multi-cloud data movement
Experience with search indexing, machine learning, or NLP is a plus
Minimum Qualifications
Strong coding skills and a solid computer science background in algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems
5+ years experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems such as databases, storage platforms, or data processing frameworks
Hands-on experience with petabyte-scale batch data processing (MapReduce, Spark, or similar)
Proficiency in cloud-native architectures and compute orchestration on AWS (S3, EC2, EKS) and Kubernetes
Excellent interpersonal skills, with the ability to work independently and drive cross-team efforts
MS or PhD in Computer Science or related field
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 $216,200 and $324,800, 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.
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Find JobsSr Staff Machine Learning Engineer Job Market in Santa Clara
Who's Hiring
- ServiceNow73

- Apple29

- Qualcomm29

- d-Matrix15

Top Industries Hiring
- Media & Entertainment15
- Technology & Software15
- Electronics & Hardware15
- Artificial Intelligence15
Sr Staff Machine Learning Engineer Jobs in Santa Clara: Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get a sr staff machine learning engineer job in Santa Clara?
The strongest path into sr staff machine learning engineer roles in Santa Clara is through the city's dense semiconductor and chip AI ecosystem, where companies building inference hardware and on-device ML need senior technical leads who can connect model architecture to silicon constraints. Candidates with experience in large-scale model optimization, MLOps on custom accelerator stacks, or production recommender systems stand out. Networking at Silicon Valley AI meetups and targeting R&D teams at Santa Clara's established fabless and cloud infrastructure employers gives a concrete edge over remote applicants.
Which companies hire sr staff machine learning engineers in Santa Clara?
Companies currently hiring sr staff machine learning engineers in Santa Clara include ServiceNow, Apple, and Qualcomm, per current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. Santa Clara's employer mix skews toward semiconductor firms, hyperscaler infrastructure divisions, and hardware-software platform companies that need senior ML talent embedded close to chip design and systems engineering teams.
Are there remote sr staff machine learning engineer jobs in Santa Clara?
Yes, though sr staff machine learning engineer roles lean toward hybrid rather than fully remote because the seniority level often involves hands-on collaboration with hardware and infrastructure teams. About 50% of sr staff machine learning engineer openings tied to Santa Clara are remote or hybrid as of November 2026, with full-remote slots most common in pure software ML platform teams. Model research and MLOps work tied to Santa Clara's cloud and enterprise platform employers tends to offer the most schedule flexibility.
How can I get a sr staff machine learning engineer job in Santa Clara with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path in Santa Clara is through junior or staff-level ML roles at the city's mid-size semiconductor software and infrastructure companies, which often promote from within more aggressively than the largest hyperscalers. Targeting applied scientist or ML engineer II positions at Santa Clara's hardware-AI startups, then building experience with on-device inference or hardware-aware training, creates a credible internal ladder toward sr staff. Contributing to open-source ML runtimes or accelerator benchmarks that Santa Clara employers actively monitor also builds visible, local-relevant signal.
Which industries hire the most sr staff machine learning engineers in Santa Clara?
The sectors hiring the most sr staff machine learning engineers in Santa Clara are Media & Entertainment, Technology & Software, and Electronics & Hardware, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. Santa Clara's position as the global center for semiconductor design and cloud infrastructure means demand in these sectors is structurally high, driven by the need to embed senior ML talent directly inside chip development and platform engineering organizations.
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