Apple Senior MLE at $446K — underrated AI job or bad career timing?
Saw this Apple Senior MLE offer (shared with Chill Interview)
- 7 YOE
- Base: $235K
- Bonus: $23.5K
- Sign-on: $50K
- RSUs: $550K / 4 years
- Year 1 TC: $446K
Apple is in a weird spot for ML engineers right now.
It finally shipped the new Siri AI, but a big part of the intelligence layer relies on Google Gemini, and Apple has lost a number of senior AI people to Meta/OpenAI over the last year.
At the same time, Apple clearly isn’t giving up on AI. It’s still hiring heavily in ML, and just built its own model for China with Alibaba’s help.
So I’m curious how ML people view Apple now.
Is $446K + Apple stability/WLB worth it if you’re not working at the absolute frontier of AI? Or would joining Apple ML today feel like falling behind OpenAI/Anthropic/Google DeepMind?
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