Distinguished Engineer

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.

About the role:

Were looking for a Distinguished Engineer to set the technical vision and lead foundational work across Homefeed Search and our emerging AI Assistant experiences at Pinterest. This role sits at the intersection of relevance ranking retrieval and generative AI and will shape how hundreds of millions of Pinners discover and act on inspiration every day.

You will operate as a cross-cutting technical leader: defining long-term architecture raising the bar on ML and systems excellence and partnering closely with product and executive leadership to drive stepfunction improvements in engagement quality and creator value.

What youll do:

• Define the long-term technical strategy and architecture for Homefeed Search and AI Assistant including retrieval ranking personalization and generative experiences.
• Drive a multiyear roadmap for unifying signals features and models across surfaces to deliver a coherent high-quality discovery experience.
• Lead the design and adoption of large-scale retrieval and ranking systems (e.g. multi-stage retrieval representation learning multi-objective optimization) that materially improve relevance and monetization.
• Architect how LLMs and foundation models integrate with our core discovery stack (e.g. query understanding intent modeling content understanding conversation orchestration safety/guardrails).
• Set technical direction for experimentation measurement and evaluation frameworks including offline metrics online experimentation and causal inference for discovery and generative use cases.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership on a small number of high-leverage projects: design critical components review designs/PRs de-risk complex launches and mentor senior engineers and staff TLs.
• Partner deeply with Product Data Science Research and Design to frame the right problems translate product bets into robust technical plans and ensure we are solving for long-term platform health not just short-term metrics.
• Raise the bar for engineering excellence: reliability performance security/privacy cost efficiency and operational health of large-scale ML systems.
• Represent Pinterest externally for these domains (e.g. talks publications partnerships) and help attract and grow top talent.
• You will report into Pinterests Core Engineering leadership and work horizontally across multiple product and platform teams responsible for Homefeed Search and AI Assistant.
• You will spend a meaningful portion of your time on hands-on technical work (design reviews prototyping) while also driving long-term strategy standards and alignment across organizations.
• You will be measured on durable technical impact: system-level improvements model and product outcomes reduction in complexity and operational risk and the growth of leaders and capabilities around you.

What were looking for:

• 15 years of industry experience in large-scale systems and/or machine learning with a track record of impact in search recommendations feeds or conversational AI.
• Proven experience as a Distinguished Engineer Architect or equivalent senior technical leader driving crossorg technical strategy and execution.
• Deep expertise in at least two of the following and strong familiarity with the others:
  • Large-scale retrieval and ranking (e.g. learning-to-rank multi-task and multi-objective optimization bandits RL for recommendations).
  • Representation learning (e.g. embeddings multi-modal models dense and sparse retrieval).
  • Search systems (indexing query understanding relevance tuning latency/throughput optimization).
  • Large language models and generative AI (prompting fine-tuning RAG agents safety/guardrails evaluation).
• Demonstrated ability to define and drive multi-year architectural transformations at scale (e.g. re-architecting a core ranking stack unifying feature platforms evolving legacy systems to modern ML platforms).
• Strong product intuition and experience partnering with PM/Design/Data Science on ambiguous 01 and 1N product bets.
• Exceptional communication skills: able to crisply articulate strategy tradeoffs and technical direction to executives peers and broad engineering audiences.
• Passion for mentoring and growing senior/staff engineers; history of building strong engineering cultures and communities of practice.
• Bachelors degree in computer science a related field or equivalent experience.

Nice to have:

• • Prior experience in consumer discovery products at global scale (e.g. feeds search recommendations marketplaces or assistants).
  • Experience building or integrating AI assistants or agentic workflows into consumer experiences.

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.
• Some teams will need you to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country. While other teams will need you to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1 times per week and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance from one of the following offices SF Palo Alto Seattle.

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