PhD Intern, Machine Learning

About the Role

At Apple, new ideas quickly transform into phenomenal products, services, and customer experiences. The Manufacturing and Operations team is dedicated to turning product visions into reality, utilizing statistics, the scientific process, and machine learning to solve the most challenging problems.

This unique PhD Intern position offers a rare opportunity to work on groundbreaking applications of machine learning, research, and implementation within Apple's Product Operations Team. Your work will have a significant impact on billions of users globally by revolutionizing how Apple's amazing products are manufactured. We are seeking ML researchers passionate about applying their skills and innovation to influence globally recognized product manufacturing processes.

Responsibilities

• Research, build, and adapt ML approaches for domain adaptation of multimodal foundation models to Apple manufacturing, spanning modalities like text, images, and video (e.g., generating physics-consistent videos).
• Develop techniques to steer large foundation models without modifying their weights, and advance multimodal knowledge-graph reasoning (domain-specific Q&A, multi-hop reasoning, disambiguation, tool/retrieval orchestration).
• Train, evaluate, and analyze model performance (e.g., exact-match/F1 accuracy, explanation quality, and generation fidelity) on public benchmarks and internal datasets.
• Apply and extend LLMs, VLMs, and World Models to advance domain adaptation for manufacturing.
• Collaborate internally within Apple to apply solutions to industrial problems.
• Conduct presentations of analyses and results to diverse audiences, including executives.

Minimum Qualifications

• Actively pursuing a PhD in Computer Science or a related field.
• Deep understanding of Machine Learning concepts, Probability, and Statistics.
• Understanding of Computer Vision & VLMs, with demonstrated skill in training models and applying them to ML application development.
• Ability to prototype research ideas as working code (Python).
• Ability to meaningfully present results of analysis in a clear and impactful manner.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with applying Machine Learning, especially Computer Vision, in a Manufacturing/Assembly setting.
• Familiarity with multimodal understanding & reasoning, knowledge-graphs, and generative video models.
• Prior publications in a relevant field.