Alexander Clines

Software Engineering Manager, Apple

I lead a team building evaluation systems for agentic AI at Apple.

Previously at Google, applying NLP research to products.

About

I enjoy interesting problems, whether that’s leading an engineering team through ambiguity or digging into a production issue.

I started at Google as a software engineer on the Language AI team, applying new NLP techniques to products across the company. At Apple I grew from senior engineer into management, first on Siri and Apple Intelligence and now on evaluation for agentic AI.

I believe managers should stay technical: writing code, giving meaningful technical feedback, and setting the tone for ownership and autonomy. I coach my team to think in terms of user impact and to take pride in work that improves people’s lives.

I’m especially interested in applying AI to agriculture and climate tech.

Outside of work, I love cooking, exploring new wineries, and hiking and camping around California. Home is with my wife Katie and our corgi, Princess Leia, in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Experience

2020 – Present

Apple

Software Engineering Manager2026 – Present

Agentic AI evaluation

Lead a team of 7 engineers building evaluation systems for agentic AI.
Expanding evaluation coverage to new device platforms, with results used in decisions on which features to ship.
Partner with product and modeling teams, and stay hands-on in design and code.

Software Engineering Manager2023 – 2026

Siri on-device natural language platform

Managed a team of 4 and led cross-functional work with dozens of engineers on Apple Intelligence, including LLM quantization, evaluation, and on-device runtime architecture.
Drove on-device natural language work beyond Siri into apps like Photos and Reminders.

Senior Software Engineer2020 – 2023

Siri on-device natural language platform

Brought natural language processing on-device, starting in iOS 15.
Led cross-team work to optimize NL models for speed and memory without losing accuracy.
Expanded the on-device platform to support features beyond Siri.

2017 – 2020

Google

Software Engineer

Language AI team

Built scalable unsupervised clustering methods and presented them at an internal Google Research conference.
Optimized large BERT models for production using distillation.
Contributed to core NLP frameworks, including Sentiment Analysis models in Google Cloud.
Acknowledged in the EMNLP 2018 paper “A Challenge Set and Methods for Noun‑Verb Ambiguity.”

Skills

Leadership

Managing engineering teams of 4–7
Tech lead for solution design
Interviewing and hiring
Cross-functional work with product and modeling teams
Turning evaluation results into ship decisions

Evaluation systems for AI, including agentic systems
In-house agent and evaluation frameworks
On-device AI: LLM quantization, runtime architecture, model optimization
Daily use of generative AI tools for design, code, and analysis

Engineering

Distributed systems, including fault-tolerant device-fleet orchestration
Cross-platform and client-server hybrid system design
Reliability and monitoring of production systems
Swift / Objective-C, C / C++, and Python
iOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS

Education

2013 – 2017

B.S. Computer Science and B.S. Mathematics, Texas Tech University

Computer Science focus on GPU computing for mathematical modeling. ICPC programming team, ACM, and a student‑led CS club.