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Director, Evaluation and Quality Assurance, Services Special Projects

Apple Inc

  • Cupertino, CA
  • 11 days ago

    Highlights

    Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with a track record of presenting quality status, risk, and trade-offs clearly to, and influencing decisions among, senior executive leadership.15+ years of experience in data science, machine learning evaluation, quality assurance, or test engineering roles in a technical product environment, including experience building and leading multi-level QA or evaluation organizations through managers. Making judgment calls under uncertainty about where to invest limited evaluation resources for maximum risk reduction.12+ years of experience in data science, machine learning evaluation, quality assurance, or test engineering roles in a technical product environment, including experience building and leading multi-level QA or evaluation organizations through managers.

    Numbers & Facts

    LocationCupertino, CA
    IndustryComputer/IT Services
    Company Size10,000 employees or more
    Year Founded1976
    Websitehttps://www.apple.com/jobs

    Description

    We are looking for a Director to build and lead the evaluation and quality assurance function for one of our most ambitious multi-year engineering initiatives. This is a true 0-to-1, first-key-hire role: There is no existing team, tooling, or process to inherit. You will define how we measure quality across an entire product end to end, build the automation and evaluation infrastructure to do it at scale (or borrow other teams infrastructure), and build and lead the organization that runs it. You will own evaluation and quality assurance for every layer of the product - from whether the system is being correctly triggered for the right set of user requests, through whether it surfaces and ranks the right results, to whether the underlying transactions execute correctly, including integrations with external partner APIs, and financial systems. Quality here isnt a single test suite - it spans conversational understanding, relevance and ranking, and revenue-bearing correctness, all against a large, constantly evolving real-world dataset.

    You will create and drive the evaluation and quality strategy and implementation for the product. This will extensively utilize automated grading systems and human evaluation programs where appropriate. You will make the calls about where to invest in each. You will define what "correct" and "good" mean for this product, wire that definition into continuous, always-on evaluation pipelines with clear pass/fail quality gates tied to releases, and build the team, tooling, and operating rhythm to catch issues before they reach users.

    As the first hire in this space, you will operate with significant latitude and ambiguity - setting strategy, process, and technical direction with minimal existing scaffolding, while also building and scaling an organization. You will partner closely with engineering, applied ML, and program management leadership, including senior executive stakeholders, and you will be a key voice in defining what "done" and "shippable" mean for a product still taking shape, as well as iterating on decision points in production after the product ships.Design metrics and automated grading systems ("autograders") that scale to large, frequently changing datasets, utilizing those alongside human evaluation, and determining where the line between those should sit. Wiring evaluation results into release processes as explicit quality gates, not just after-the-fact reporting. Catching and preventing quality regressions across an entire product surface - from user-facing correctness to backend transaction integrity. Partnering with engineering and applied ML teams to define what "quality" and "done" mean before a products own definitions of those things have settled. Navigating ambiguity and building structure - process, tooling, org design - in an environment where none of it exists yet. Making judgment calls under uncertainty about where to invest limited evaluation resources for maximum risk reduction.12+ years of experience in data science, machine learning evaluation, quality assurance, or test engineering roles in a technical product environment, including experience building and leading multi-level QA or evaluation organizations through managers. Demonstrated experience building an evaluation or QA function from the ground up - defining metrics, process, tooling, and organizational structure where none previously existed. Extensive experience utilizing LLM-based autograders and rubrics, including rubric design, evaluation set development, validation, calibration, and human-model alignment, and using them to proactively drive product and model improvements. Deep experience in traditional human evaluation methodology, logging, and A/B testing for consumer-facing products at scale. Experience evaluating conversational AI, recommendation, ranking, or search systems, and - ideally - agentic or tool-use systems that take real-world actions, not just generate responses. BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience. Experience with quality assurance for third-party API integrations. Experience with logging infrastructure and instrumentation for AI product quality measurement. Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with a track record of presenting quality status, risk, and trade-offs clearly to, and influencing decisions among, senior executive leadership.15+ years of experience in data science, machine learning evaluation, quality assurance, or test engineering roles in a technical product environment, including experience building and leading multi-level QA or evaluation organizations through managers.

    About Company

    We bring amazing people together to make amazing things happen.

    We’re a diverse collection of thinkers and doers, continually reimagining what’s possible to help us all do what we love in new ways. The people who work here have reinvented entire industries with the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, as well as with services, including iTunes, the App Store, Apple Music, and Apple Pay. And the same passion for innovation that goes into our products also applies to our practices — strengthening our commitment to leave the world better than we found it.

    About Apple

    There’s a place here for every kind of brilliant. Everyone here is an innovator, or an innovator-to-be, no matter what your team or your role. So bring your passion, courage, and original thinking and get ready to share it, because every new product, service, or feature we invent is the result of people working together to make each others’ ideas stronger. Innovation at this level depends on people who represent the variety of the human experience and inspire us with their own fresh perspectives. Together, we’ll do amazing work that can make a difference in people’s lives. Including your own. Learn more about working at Apple.

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