Senior ML Research Scientist, RL & Agentic Reasoning

Apple seeks a Senior ML Research Scientist in Zürich to advance agentic reasoning and reinforcement learning for its Core Foundation Models team.

This position sits within the Europe-based Core Foundation Models team, which develops intelligence for billions of devices worldwide. The role involves collaborating with colleagues in New York, Seattle, and Cupertino to push the boundaries of large-scale language models through advanced reinforcement learning techniques.

Responsibilities

• Develop and apply reinforcement learning methods to enhance planning, reasoning, and agentic capabilities in next-generation foundation models.
• Engage with the full AI development lifecycle, including designing multi-modal architectures, improving decision-making processes, and managing large-scale deployments.

Requirements

• Hold a PhD or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a closely related discipline, or possess equivalent professional experience.
• Demonstrate deep knowledge of generative AI architectures, with practical experience in training and scaling large language models or multimodal foundation models.
• Show industry experience in building, training, and deploying large-scale machine learning systems, focusing on performance optimization.
• Possess a strong background in deep learning and reinforcement learning, including hands-on application of these methods to LLMs and foundation models.

Nice to have

• Proficiency in Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
• Ability to analyze data, identify bottlenecks, and optimize large-scale models for efficiency.
• Experience delivering ML-driven product features at scale in an industry setting.
• Proven track record in designing, training, and optimizing LLMs or multimodal foundation models.
• Expert-level understanding of machine learning theory, particularly in generative modeling and large-scale architectures.
• Research or applied experience in decision-making, reinforcement learning, and agentic reasoning.
• Strong research publication record at leading AI/ML or NLP venues like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, or ACL.

About the company

Apple is seeking exceptional talent to join its global team of researchers and engineers. The Core Foundation Models team collaborates with some of the brightest minds across Apple’s centers worldwide, fostering a culture of innovation and excellence.

• Collaboration with top-tier talent across Apple’s global research centers.
• Focus on advancing intelligence for billions of devices through cutting-edge AI research.