Main image of article Want to Work at Apple? Here are Top 10 Tech Jobs It Hires For

Working at Apple is a dream for many technologists, but landing a full-time gig at its Cupertino campus can feel impossible. The company is always hiring, but poking through their vast jobs portal is daunting. We’ve done the heavy lifting for you: here are the roles most in-demand at Apple.

For this study, we dug through Burning Glass’ NOVA platform for jobs data, and isolated Apple’s Cupertino headquarters from the pack. From there, we further distilled our findings to the tech jobs it posted for all of 2019. We’ll add an important caveat to this data: it lists only the jobs Apple posted directly, and does not account for hires made via recruiting agencies, or contractors (such as H-1B firms).

So, which role is the most popular at Apple? “Software development engineer” is far and away the most-posted position in Cupertino. The three-word designation is a bit unique, but these are essentially what we’d normally call “software engineers.” A quick poke through Levels.fyi shows no specific designation for a 'software development engineer' at Apple, but that crowdsourced-compensation site does list several tiers for software engineering roles.

With 747 software development engineer jobs posted in 2019, it’s the strongest indication Apple is still dedicated to applications, services, and platforms, no matter how broadly pundits want to ding their efforts in those arenas.

Another (perhaps unsurprisingly) popular job at Apple is machine learning engineer, which ranks second with 101 jobs posted in 2019. Systems Engineer, QA engineer, and the oddly plain “engineer” roles rounded out the top five with 86, 83, and 79 jobs posted this year, respectively.

One assumption may be that Apple is ramping its hiring up in anticipation of something, but the longer tail doesn’t support that. When we compared the same positional hiring to 2018, we found Apple hiring for these jobs at the same rate. It’s just a massive company with plenty of turnover.

If there’s a specific head-scratcher, it’s that artificial intelligence or augmented reality roles aren’t on this list. We’ll assume Apple simply hires developers into machine learning roles for A.I., as they’re quite similar, and AR is simply a skillset it requires for many of its software engineering roles.