Alexander Clines is a Software Engineering Manager at Apple, driving the integration of AI into products that shape how people use technology. He brings technical expertise, product intuition, and a passion for delivering meaningful user impact.
I thrive on solving interesting problems, whether it’s building AI-powered experiences used by millions of people, leading engineering teams through ambiguity, or diving into production issues.
My career began at Google as a Software Engineer, where I worked on large-scale natural language processing systems and machine learning frameworks. Apple gave me the opportunity to grow into senior engineering and, later, management—roles where I’ve combined technical leadership with a passion for building products that matter.
I believe managers should stay technical: writing code, providing meaningful technical feedback, and setting the tone for ownership and autonomy. I coach my team to think in terms of user impact, to thrive in ambiguity, and to take pride in building things that directly improve people’s lives.
Outside of work, you’ll usually find me exploring new food and wine, camping or hiking in the Santa Cruz Mountains, or spending time with my wife Katie and our corgi, Princess Leia.
At Apple, I’ve had the opportunity to work on Siri and Apple Intelligence, helping shape how AI shows up across iOS, macOS, tvOS, and visionOS.
- Led the effort to bring on-device natural language models beyond Siri and into core apps like Photos and Reminders, partnering with architects and cross‑functional teams to drive adoption.
- Stay hands‑on in design and code; support production issues and integrations with modeling teams during high‑stakes moments.
- Build teams that thrive in ambiguity with an emphasis on ownership, autonomy, and user impact.
- Performance optimization of NL models
- On‑device platform expansion beyond Siri
- Objective‑C/Swift, Python for analysis
At Google, I worked on large‑scale natural language processing and machine learning systems.
- Implemented scalable clustering methods and presented the work at an internal Google Research conference.
- Optimized BERT models for production via distillation and related techniques; explored LSTM applications in Google Ads.
- Contributed to frameworks for sentiment analysis and other NLP tasks; acknowledged in the EMNLP 2018 paper “A Challenge Set and Methods for Noun‑Verb Ambiguity.”
- 2016: iOS (Swift), Android (Java), and Polymer cross‑platform work
- 2015: Backend infrastructure; RESTful API with MySQL and J2EE