Director of Engineering, Core & Ads Serving Platform

About Pinterest:

Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest were on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love and that starts with the people behind the product.

Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions transform passion into growth opportunities celebrate each others unique experiences and embrace theflexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love Its Possible.

At Pinterest AI isnt just a feature its a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact and were looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities well explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI.

Through our interview process what matters most is that you can always explain your approach showing us not just what you know but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here.

Pinterest is looking for a Principal Engineer to lead the technical strategy and execution for our Indexing & Retrieval Infrastructure across Core Ads and Shopping. This role sits at the center of our delivery infrastructure organization and will shape how fresh relevant and cost-efficient candidates are generated for the discovery experiences that power Pinterest at scale.

What youll do:

• Define and drive the long-term technical vision for indexing and retrieval infrastructure across Core Ads and Shopping aligning architecture investments to measurable improvements in freshness quality coverage reliability and cost efficiency.
• Lead cross-org initiatives to modernize Pinterests indexing architecture including advancing unified real-time and incremental retrieval systems that support high-scale high-quality candidate generation.
• Partner closely with engineering product ML and infrastructure leaders to align priorities resolve tradeoffs and deliver shared platform capabilities that improve retrieval performance across multiple discovery surfaces.
• Raise the technical bar for retrieval infrastructure by guiding system design architecture reviews and execution on complex platform changes that span document ingestion indexing retrieval and quality evaluation.
• Build shared platform capabilities such as common metrics tuning surfaces and debugging workflows that help teams understand and improve the tradeoffs between relevance safety engagement revenue and infrastructure cost.
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leaders across teams fostering strong engineering judgment inclusive collaboration and high standards for operational excellence.
• Use AI to accelerate analysis prototyping and iteration on system design options while applying engineering judgment and verification to ensure correctness reliability and quality.
• Use AI to streamline repeatable work such as summarizing technical investigations drafting design artifacts and synthesizing platform insights so teams can move faster on high-impact decisions.

What were looking for:

• Deep expertise building and evolving large-scale indexing search recommendation or ads retrieval systems including real-time and incremental architectures relevance tradeoffs and cost-efficient distributed infrastructure.
• Strong technical leadership experience operating across multiple teams or organizations with a track record of influencing direction aligning stakeholders and driving complex platform decisions to completion.
• Proven ability to lead large modernization efforts such as architectural convergence migration from legacy systems rollout of shared platforms or introduction of new infrastructure capabilities at scale.
• Exceptional systems thinking and problem-solving skills with the ability to connect platform design decisions to downstream product quality ML needs operational health and business outcomes.
• Strong communication skills including the ability to distill complex technical topics for senior technical and non-technical audiences and to drive clarity in ambiguous high-impact spaces.
• Demonstrated experience using AI to improve speed and quality in day-to-day engineering workflows such as technical analysis prototyping design exploration documentation or synthesis of complex information.
• Strong track record of critically evaluating and validating AI-assisted work through testing source-checking peer review and sound engineering judgment with clear accountability for final decisions and deliverables.
• High integrity ownership and care in handling sensitive data and production-critical systems including thoughtful use of AI without over-reliance and with strong attention to privacy safety and correctness.
• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science Engineering a related technical field or equivalent experience.

Relocation Statement:

• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.

In-Office Requirement Statement:

• We recognize that the ideal environment for work is situational and may differ across departments. What this looks like day-to-day can vary based on the needs of each organization or role.
• This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times per quarter and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices: PA or SF offices.

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